By acquiring MailFrontier, SonicWall can better compete with vendors such as Symantec and CipherTrust, according to Brockett. "The market out there for messaging security is very fragmented right now. This probably has a lot of vendors worried," he said.
MailFrontier has about 100 VAR partners and 1,700 customers, and about 80 percent of the company’s total sales go through those partners, Brockett said. Between 30 percent and 40 percent of MailFrontier VARs are also SonicWall resellers, he said. SonicWall has about 10,000 solution provider partners worldwide. Both vendors have had much success in the midsize-business and enterprise markets, he said.
"[The MailFrontier acquisition] rounds out SonicWall’s product solutions very well. Antispam was one of the only missing components they had," said Koji Mori, general manager of network services at Calsoft Systems, a Torrance, Calif.-based solution provider and SonicWall partner. "I've lost a lot of deals to MailFrontier, so now maybe this is something I can lead with."
THOMAS ZIZZO contributed to this story.