Using both an appliance at the ISP and a hosted system, Red Condor claims more detailed analysis, less management costs, and competitive pricing for a system being sold aggressively to ISPs.

by Alex Goldman ISP-Planet Managing Editor [February 24, 2009]

Rohnert Park, Calif.-based anti-spam company Red Condor was founded in 2002. Why would anyone want to enter a market with several hundred competitors?

"I and two other guys were just finishing off some consulting work," explains Jeff Aguilera, the company's founder. "We were doing analytical charts for investors and were looking for the next big opportunity in that field. During this period, my spam problem got worse and worse. It got to 40 or 50 each day (though now that doesn't seem so bad)."

"So I asked our e-mail tech to activate all the anti-spam filters, all the RBLs, and I had no spam for three or four hours, and I sent him an e-mail thanking him for solving the problem. The next morning, I found that my e-mail had been blocked as spam. We spent a lot of time trying to figure out which filters should be active and which not, and nothing worked really well."

He decided there was an opportunity.

Technology
A successful company requires good technology and good marketing. For years, Red Condor has been focusing on the technology, and only recently hired a new CEO, Thomas Steding, the founding CEO of PGP, to improve the company's marketing and PR.

"I was attracted to this position because the company is taking a good approach," he says.

Red Condor's solution involves both an appliance and a hosted solution. The company calls it "hybrid."

"We have developed about 1.3 million rules," says Aguilera, "but there are never more than 30,000 or 40,000 active at any time. In comparison, the typical anti-virus engine might be applying 80,000 rules evolved over 20 years. We're 50 times that scale after 5 years, and that's because the spam problem is similar to the virus problem, but evolves at a faster pace."

With both a hosted system and an appliance, the hosted system can act as backup, notes Steding, handling all of the load if the box fails, or just the overflow if the mail system is attacked and experiences a massive e-mail peak.

Marketing
Red Condor is going after the install base of Postini and Barracuda, says Steding. "The reputation of Postini has gone through the floor since its acquisition by Google," he says.

He touts "the deepest and most extensive filter process on the market, and probably the fastest time to deployment of rules when a new campaign is detected—minutes!—and a blockage rate higher than anybody else."

He claims the company's pricing is comparable to Postini and Barracuda, with a greater ease of management that delivers cost savings.

Christy Kenyon, marketing communication manager at Red Condor, delivers a fistful of case studies that hammer home the point.

Geneseo Telephone Company of Geneseo, Il. switched from Postini. Waitsfield, Vt.-based Green Mountain Access looked at Barracuda, Symantec, and Postini but chose Red Condor. Hebron, Ind.-based NetNITCO, in business since 1996, recently abandoned its home grown solution for Red Condor.

Eden Prairie, Minn.-based VISI was using both Barracuda and Postini and switched to Red Condor. Red Condor's case study (.pdf) quotes Jason Baker, VISI's CTO, as saying, "we were not happy with the performance of the Barracuda spam firewalls . . . once Google decided to raise our prices by 30 percent, we knew it would be a good time to conduct a technology survey."

Expect to hear more from Red Condor. "For the first few years, we were three or four guys in a garage," says Aguilera. "It was slow organic growth. We had a reliable base of cutomers, some success in the muni market, especially in Northern California, but it was not until 2007 that we decided to try to get to the next level. We obtained angel and then venture financing and now we've got a new CEO in place and a new marketing team. We're saying, 'hey, we exist and we think we do a pretty damn good job. Take a look!'"

Pricing and availability
Red Condor anti-spam is available now. Pricing is not disclosed. A free 30 day trial is available. The company is aggressively courting ISPs. The company has a data center on the East Coast and one on the West Coast.

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