August 02, 2010
Proofpoint Marks 7 Years of Increasing Quarterly Revenue: Federal Adoption of Cloud Computing, Privacy and Encryption Demand Contribute to Record Quarter
In a press release issued today, Proofpoint recapped quarterly results from Q2 2010, announcing 7 years (28 consecutive quarters) of increasing quarterly revenue. As we've seen in previous quarters, data privacy and regulatory compliance concerns were an important driver for new business once again.
Proofpoint CEO Gary Steele said that, “There are four key issues driving enterprise IT security spend right now—an increasingly sophisticated spam and malware threat landscape, urgency around protecting consumer and data privacy, pressure to address electronic discovery issues and a realization that SaaS can greatly reduce security and compliance costs. Proofpoint’s solutions are ideally suited to meeting these needs.”
Regular readers of this blog will recognize that the trend toward more strict data protection regulations and increasing eDiscovery needs isn't particularly new. However, one very interesting new trend reported in Proofpoint's latest release is that the Federal market for SaaS solutions is definitely heating up.
One new deal mentioned in the press release is the adoption of Proofpoint's SaaS email archiving solution by a large US Federal agency for an initial 6000 mailboxes with plans to eventually roll the solution out to archive email for more than 70,000 of the agency's employees.
Commenting on the deal, Steele says, “To date, Federal agencies have been extremely cautious about adoption of SaaS solutions and this deployment of Proofpoint Archive will be among the first and largest SaaS deployment—of any kind—in the Federal market. The selection of Proofpoint is a strong validation of the unique security, reliability and scalability features of our SaaS architecture and applications.”
There's been quite a bit of news coverage recently about Federal adoption of cloud computing-based solutions—for example, the ongoing battle between Google and Microsoft to provide email hosting services for 15,000 employees at the GSA (see, "Google cloud-computing applications get certification for federal government use," in Sunday's Washington Post for just one example).
Proofpoint's efforts in the US Federal Government sector increasedduring the quarter with the appointment of a new VP of federal operations. In an announcement from June 2010, Proofpoint noted that:
"Over the years, Proofpoint has gained strong momentum in the public sector, protecting more than one million government email inboxes including many federal civilian agencies, department of defense organizations such as the US Coast Guard, and the intelligence community. By achieving important information assurance certifications such as NIAP’s Common Criteria EAL2+ and NIST FIPS 140-2, Proofpoint is trusted to protect mission-critical applications and mitigate risk through its email security, archiving and data loss prevention solutions. "
Of course, it's not just the Federal government market that's moving to SaaS: Enterprises in the private sector continue to move to SaaS. As just one example, Proofpoint's release notes that the number of messages under management by its SaaS email archiving solution doubled in the past 12 months and that this trend is accelerating.
For more on the trends that drove Proofpoint's revenues to record levels once again, see the full press release:
