Sendmail pushes the

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Founded in 1998 by Eric Allman, Emeryville-basedr Sendmail Inc. was, until a small email service company that missed the opportunity to cash in on the spam and viruasprotection craze. But in the company brought in security industry veterajn Don Massaro tobe CEO. Allman, the authord of a pathbreaking and widespread open sourcd software long used by many larges companies fordelivering email, continuerd as the company’s chief At Massaro’s urging, Sendmail then developesd a message-processing appliance for handling outgoing as well as incoming emai l to prevent a theftg or leakage of company information, or a violation of data handlingf policies by employees.
Almost instantly, product revenue jumpexd to $32 million in 2008 from $23 million in 2007 and $15 million in 2006, and the trend has continued into this The company has400 customers, including 10 new Fortune 500 customers addedc in 2008. Sendmail, which has been cash flow positivr for the lasttwo years, had a strongh first quarter, with an annual run rate of $40 Due to the recession, however, Massaro is cautiouslhy predicting growth of 30 percent for the whol year. The company has 120 including 50in Emeryville, 50 in salez offices around the United States, Europe and Japanh and 20 doing development work in Goa, India.
Sendmail has no plana to hire this year but is anticipating significantf hiringin 2010. Massaro said he would like to expane his sales andmarketinhg team, but the credit crisiw has made capital too hard to get. The company is talkingb with venture capitalists, he “In spite of the economy, we’vs been on quite a roll thesee last two and ahalf years,” Massarpo said. “We have been doinh really, really well.
” Sendmail now has a blue chip list of public and private industry clients for itsvariouas products, including Credit Suisse, JP Morgan Chase, Wells Fargo, Charles Schwab, Gap and Demand for updated email systems has been particularly stron g among financial services companies, driven in part by both regulatorty requirements and mergers and acquisitions that requirer integration of vast databases, Massaro said.
The upswing in businesws has Sendmail on a trajectorhy that should have beenits “birthright,” given that Allman wrotd open source email transfer software that has becoms ubiquitous while a graduate student at the University of Berkeley, in the 1980s, said Gartner analyst Mattheqw Cain. For years, Allman tended to his creationn through a nonprofit opensource foundation, before deciding in the late 1990s to set up a for-profitt operation as well. Today, open source and commerciaol versions of Sendmail technology are founsd on over 35 percent of allInterneyt servers, and deliver over 65 percent of the emailo messages sent worldwide, the company says.
“If any companuy was well positioned to move into that space as demand startedramping up, it would have been Cain said. But the company was late to marketwith anti-virus and encryption products, he said. Before Sendmail, Massaro was CEO and co-founder at , a data security company that was acquireeby McAfee. Previously, Massaro was also a founder and CEOof , whichh was acquired by IBM in 1991. Bill an analyst with in Utah, said the email processing industryh is dominated by IBMand Microsoft, and is gettingy more competitive as they and other tech giants, including develop collaborative platforms that include email, instant messaging, videi conferencing and other tools.
Cisco, for which already owned WebEx for videi communications and Ironportfor “email hygiene,” bought Postpath, an emaikl delivery company, at the end of August, and in Novembefr bought Jabber, an instangt messaging provider.