GFI Software to host following Katharion acquisition

Email and network security software company GFI Software has acquired Los Angeles-based hosted email filtering company Katharion, the company announced yesterday.

Through this acquisition, GFI will start offering a hosted email filtering, anti-spam and anti-virus service later this quarter.

“This is the next step of our strategy to give our customers the option of having an email filtering product that is on-premise, in the cloud as well as additional services that would be of benefit to those looking to maximise the benefits of a hybrid option. Katharion offers superior technology to other hosted email filtering technologies as well as an infrastructure that will help GFI to give our customers even greater choice,” says Walter Scott, GFI’s CEO.

The firm has more than 2000 resellers in the UK. “We believe that through this acquisition we will be providing a complementary solution to partners enabling them to sell more and provide value added to their clients,” Scott told Channel Pro. “Overall, this will allow GFI to continue developing its solutions portfolio and our ability to be an infrastructure provider for the small and medium-size business. The first phase of this strategy to be able to provide online, on-premise or a mix of both options came with the acquisition of GFI MAX (formerly HoundDog) in July and Katharion is our next move to provide the channel with another superior solution for them to sell.”

A survey commissioned by GFI Software in September found that 55 percent of SMBs in the US use one or more hosted/managed services. Of these 29 percent use a service for minor applications; 24 percent for security applications; 26 percent for network monitoring and redundancy and 21percent for CRM/ERM.