E-mail security company comes to Kingcourt

Once the preserve of software and appliance suppliers, E-Mail security is soon to be offered online on a pay-as-you-go basis by Irish firm MXSweep from a new premises in Kingscourt. The company presently based in Co. Meath are soon to relocate to Kingscourt and in recent months, the company has secured investment from Enterprise Ireland. This brings the total amount raised by the company since 2006 to €2.5 million. The company has a number of private investors and its major shareholder is Eugene Murtagh, the chairman and founder of Kingspan. The company is targeting a turnover of €850,000 this year and projecting turnover to grow to €2 million by 2010 and to €4.5 million by 2012. The chief executive of MXSweep, Ed Grant, says the company, which was established in 2006, has ambitious plans for international expansion. Mr. Grant who worked for Citigroup came on board as chief executive in 2008 with the aim of developing sales internationally. 'We are well positioned to take advantage of the shift in the way services are delivered and are making plans to develop sales in Scandinavia and other European markets. We also have long term plans to target the US market,' said Mr. Grant. They already have attracted 1,200 customers in Europe since 2006. He adds that the shift in hosted E-Mail security is now accelerating due to the current economic climate. 'The hosted solution is cheaper and more effective than other types of E-Mail security and has now become the fastest growing part of the industry,' says Mr. Grant. He says that the growth in the E-Mail security industry worldwide is now being driven by an explosive increase in spam and virus attacks. The €3 million E-Mail security market has until recent times been dominated by companies supplying software and appliances, but according to Ed Grant, the hosted solution is now gaining momentum rapidly. Delivered on the internet on a pay-as-you-go basis, the software puts a halt to the increasingly sophisticated threats before they reach the user"s IT infrastructure and has the advantages that it does not require updating and it does not involve capital expansion. The company"s services are sold on a monthly subscription basis through 112 specialist managed service companies in Britain and Ireland. Through these partners the company provides services for over 1,200 corporate customers, mainly SMEs and manages over 30 million E-Mails a day. End users in Britain include Allergy Therapeutics, Canterbury Cathedral and Yorkshire Transport Authority. In Ireland it is used, for example, by the Kingspan Group and the Commission for Energy Regulation. The company recently signed an SaaS distribution agreement with specialist saas vendor Organic IT, which sells in the Benelux countries. 'This is a particularly innovative venture and we believe we are the first to build this online distribution platform - branded Master SaaS, which allows traditional and online SaaS distributors to sell E-Mail security services to their customers,' says Mr. Grant.