Scott Weiss has a knack of getting in on things early. In 1996, he was one of the first employees of Hotmail, later to be acquired by Microsoft to become the world's largest webmail service.
A decade later, in January this year, the Harvard MBA-holder sold IronPort Systems to Cisco for a cool $830 million (€586 million) , barely seven years after he co-founded it with Scott Bannister.
Chances are most readers won't have heard of Weiss or of IronPort, an e-mail security and web-filtering firm that makes hardware appliances that are installed on corporate e-mail gateways to monitor e-mail traffic and knock out spam.
Cisco had been an IronPort customer for nearly three years before the acquisition and knew the company's technology well.
Weiss however had other plans - an IPO to be precise - and he claims that IronPort was "an unwilling bride" until late in the two-year courtship. In the end, the golden carrot dangled by Cisco was impossible to ignore.
Today, IronPort operates as a separate business unit within Cisco, having retained both its name and Weiss as its boss, though he now goes by the title of vice-president and general manager rather than chief executive.
Weiss was in Dublin last week as part of a whistle-stop tour of IronPort's European operations.
The company sells entirely through the "channel" - trade partners which resell the products on its behalf. In Ireland, these include Entropy, part of the Calyx group, and PlanNet 21, as well as systems integrators such as IBM Global Services, HP and Fujitsu. Since it started in business in Ireland in 2004, IronPort has signed up 70 customers, many of them blue-chips such as AIB, Bank of Ireland, Invesco, Bank of Scotland Ireland, Pioneer Investments, the Irish Stock Exchange and Grafton Group.
In the public sector, customers include the National Treatment Purchase Fund and the Health and Safety Authority. The company is projecting revenues of approximately €3 million in 2007.
IronPort's main product line, the C Series, is an e-mail security appliance carrying out anti-spam, anti-virus, policy control and selective data encryption. It recently introduced the S Series, which does more or less the same thing.
The real jewel in its crown, however, is SenderBase, its massive global database of complaint data relating to millions of IP addresses. The IronPort spam filter refines this data by cross-checking the addresses against dozens of other criteria, such as how long an IP address has existed (spammers change IP addresses all the time) and whether the IP address receives as well as sends e-mail (an IP address used for spamming will never receive e-mail).
In this way, it can build up a sort of "credit history" for each IP address. Those found not to be credit-worthy are deemed to be spammers and their e-mail is blocked; the e-mail of the credit-worthy gets through the spam filter.
"Senderbase knocks out the vast majority - about 85 per cent - of the spam simply by looking at the source of the e-mail," Weiss says.
Weiss says there are two reasons why spam complacency is misplaced. The first is that it is reaching epidemic levels and getting worse. The volume of rogue e-mail has been doubling every year and now more than 90 per cent of all e-mail is spam.
The second is that spam is becoming increasingly dangerous, going from being a business nuisance to a genuine business threat.
Weiss warns that businesses are under siege from spam. "I think of it as a team-on-team war because you are fighting these groups who are increasingly well funded and who are trying to breach your defences - and it's not just for the sake of notoriety; they're trying to make money."
