| Competitive Comparison
The diagram below describes the position of the main software
solutions within the new employee Internet management market. The size
of the circle reflects the vendor's share of the corporate market in
terms of the number of employees managed. The corporate EIM market
includes companies with over 100 Internet-enabled employees.
Enterprise scalability reflects a supplier's ability to
scale from small to large, enterprise-class implementations.
Completeness of EIM solution indicates the supplier's ability
to deliver on the requirements of an EIM solution.
Summary of Vendors in the Corporate EIM Market
Websense Enterprise
Websense Enterprise was designed to accommodate the unique needs of a
corporation. Utilizing a sophisticated application with a proprietary
URL database, Websense can be configured to the unique culture of a
corporation with numerous management and reporting functions. It is
tightly integrated with the leading Internet infrastructure providers,
including Cisco, Check Point, Inktomi and CacheFlow. As a result,
Websense has 9,000 corporate customers including half of the Fortune
500. Websense is the only EIM company that makes readily available
a list of their business customers.
Websense corporate customer list: http://www.websense.com/products/why/customers.cfm
SurfControl
SurfControl offers five unrelated and non-integrated product lines
that were acquired via acquisitions. These acquisitions target the
home/ISP, education, and small business markets. In fact, half of its
revenues are derived from the school and home markets. SurfControl
recently purchased CyberPatrol from toymaker Mattel. With its roots in
the home/school filtering market, CyberPatrol's database focuses
primarily on pornography. Furthermore, CyberPatrol does not have a
built in reporting tool.
SuperScout, the company's enterprise product, provides policy-based
Internet access control based on "sniffer" technology.
Sniffing technology hinders scalability because it is subject to
overload during times of high Internet usage. Consequently,
SurfControl's success in the corporate market has been in smaller
environments.
SurfControl corporate customer list: Not available
Symantec I-Gear
In 1999, Symantec purchased URLabs, the publisher of I-Gear, an
Internet access management system. I-Gear focused on the education
market, with limited success in the enterprise market. I-Gear uses
so-called Dynamic Document Review to look at each Web page as it
passes through the network. This technology is typically substandard
at URL classification and affects network performance. I-Gear also
offers a limited URL database.
I-Gear corporate customer list: Not available
Elron IM Web Inspector
Elron has numerous products targeted towards the Internet management
arena. The company's approach is focused primarily on reporting-only
vs. policy enforcement. However, Internet Manager can block sites
based on "smart" content filtering similar to Symantec's DDR
technology, rather than by using an Internet site database. As such,
this product requires significant IT interaction and does not scale
well in large installations.
Internet Manager corporate customer list: Not available
N2H2
N2H2 is primarily targeted at the education market, and its share of
the corporate market is negligible. Bess, the company’s main
product, is a hardware/software proxy combination. The N2H2 business
model includes generating advertising revenue from ad impressions to
children on the N2H2 ResourceBar which is part of the N2H2 product.
This advertising accounted for one-third of their overall revenue.
N2H2 corporate customer list: Not available
Secure Computing SmartFilter
SmartFilter from Secure Computing manages and monitors Internet access
via the SmartFilter Control List, a list of URLs that is updated only
on a weekly basis. SmartFilter's focus has been on being a "porn
blocker" with limited policy and management capabilities. Various
integrations with Unix have driven some limited success in the
corporate market. Financial viability questions have been raised by
the financial press.
SmartFilter corporate customer list: Not available
Vendor Comparison Table
The following table details the leading EIM providers offerings and
is broken into the following segments:
- Enterprise Features: How well does the product meet the
administrative and technology needs of a enterprise.
- Management Options: Is the offering flexible enough to
meet the needs of the employees
- Reporting: Reports on activity
- Database of Internet Sites: Accuracy and freshness of the
database
- Performance: The ability to scale to meet performance
demands
- Network Control Points: Where in the network does the
product interface.
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