A handful of people have asked me what I think of Microsoft purchasing Frontbridge. One comment I made here was:

"The takeovers seem random, said Pete Lindstrom, a research director at Spire Security. "I think it is a reactive approach. They are picking up security products that they think are important to customers," he said. "It doesn’t strike me that there is an obvious strategy to this." "

While this is an accurate portrayal of what I said (and believe in a general sense), I probably should (and did) illuminate a bit more about this particular acquisition. Other than the likelihood that Frontbridge has a nice revenue stream going and is in a growth segment, here are some possibilities that I find intriguing:

1. The opportunity to deploy Frontbridge to Microsoft’s ready-made MSN installed base of x million subscribers (sorry, couldn’t find a current estimate – 5? 10?).
2. Frontbridge anti-spam technology may be useful if it can be integrated into Sybari’s email security framework. (Who knows, maybe this can also fit on ISA Server).
3. Frontbridge also does a little bit on the Trust side, with its encryption and archiving capabilities. The possibilities here are a bit more interesting, as Microsoft has often expressed concern about spam and stronger validation of sender is one approach to reducing, or at least devaluing, spam.

I still am not clear on how the antivirus solution will fit into this, but I anticipate that it will somehow, assuming the software can also be plugged into the Sybari framework and used by Frontbridge as well.

All in all, not something that fires me up nearly as much from a strategic perspective as the NGSCB initiative.