GFI Software acquires Katharion

GFI Software has acquired hosted email filtering company Katharion and will be able to offer a hosted email filtering, anti-spam and anti-virus service later this quarter.

With this new service GFI will be able to provide a range of additional or edge services that will benefit companies both with and without existing on-premise email security solutions. For example, companies can use the hosted service to block up to 90% of the total emails received by the company (which are spam) and therefore reduce their bandwidth costs and the volume of junk hitting their server.

The GFI hosted and edge anti-spam and anti-virus filtering solutions will work with any mail structure including Microsoft, Novell, Apple, and Linux environments. Both the hosted and edge solutions will provide for email continuity – if a customer’s server goes down, the GFI service will keep a copy of all inbound email messages, and allow customers to access and respond to those messages, until the server is back online.

Katharion offers outsourced anti-spam and anti-virus email filtering solutions for corporations, small businesses, Internet service providers and technology companies. As a managed service, Katharion is compatible with any email system and can be implemented rapidly.

“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 maximize 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,” Walter Scott, GFI’s CEO said.