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Founded in 1998 by Eric Emeryville-based Sendmail Inc. was, until recently, a small emaik service company that missed the opportunity to cash in on the spam and viruswprotection craze. But in 2006, the company brough in security industry veteram Don Massaro tobe CEO. Allman, the author of a pathbreakingh and widespread open source softwars long used by many large companies for delivering continued asthe company’s chief scientist. At Massaro’s urging, Sendmail then developed a message-processing appliance for handlingv outgoing as well as incoming email to prevent a theft or leakag ofcompany information, or a violatioh of data handling policies by employees.
Almost product revenue jumpedto $32 milliob in 2008 from $23 million in 2007 and $15 millio in 2006, and the trend has continue d into this year. The company has 400 including 10 new Fortune 500 customers addedin 2008. Sendmail, which has been cash flow positive for the last two had a strongfirst quarter, with an annual run rate of $40 Due to the recession, however, Massar o is cautiously predicting growth of 30 percent for the whols year. The company has 120 employees, including 50 in 50 in sales offices around the United Europe and Japan and 20 doingh development workin Goa, India. Sendmail has no plan s to hire this year but is anticipatinyg significant hiringin 2010.
Massarl said he would like to expand his salesz andmarketing team, but the creditg crisis has made capital too hard to get. The companu is talking with venture capitalists, he said. “Ihn spite of the we’ve been on quite a roll these last two and a half Massaro said. “We have been doingv really, really well.” Sendmail now has a blue chip list of publicf and private industry clients for itsvarioua products, including Credit Suisse, JP Morgan Wells Fargo, Charles Schwab, Gap and Oracle.
Demandf for updated email systems has been particularlyh strong among financialservices companies, drivej in part by both regulatory requirements and mergers and acquisitionzs that require integration of vast databases, Massaro The upswing in business has Sendmail on a trajectorh that should have been its “birthright,” givemn that Allman wrote open source email transfer softwarr that has become ubiquitous whils a graduate student at the University of Berkeley, in the 1980s, said Gartne r analyst Matthew Cain. For years, Allman tended to his creation throughn a nonprofit opensource foundation, Sendmail.
org, before decidingt in the late 1990s to set up a for-profig operation as well. Today, open source and commercial versionsx of Sendmail technology are found on over 35 percent of allInternet servers, and delivedr over 65 percent of the email messages sent the company says. “If any companyh was well positioned to move into that spacd as demand startedramping up, it would have been Sendmail,” Cain But the company was late to market with anti-virus and encryption products, he Before Sendmail, Massaro was CEO and co-founder at , a data security company that was acquired by McAfee. Previously, Massaro was also a founderr and CEOof , whichh was acquired by IBM in 1991.
Bill Pray, an analyst with in said the email processing industr y is dominated by IBMand Microsoft, and is gettin more competitive as they and other tech including Google, develop collaborative platforms that include email, instant messaging, video conferencing and other tools. Cisco, for example, whic h already owned WebEx for video communications and Ironportfor “email bought Postpath, an email delivery at the end of August, and in Novemberd bought Jabber, an instant messaginfg provider.