NetXactics, the southern African distributor for Sophos, a world leader in corporate anti-virus protection, today announced that the latter had recorded record results for its last fiscal year.
In 2002, Sophos experienced a growth rate, more than twice the rate of analyst expectations, for the overall anti-virus market. The company attributes this growth to several key factors including its commitment to execution, product development, its extended protection through partners and its growing customer base of well over 20 million.
Analyst group IDC (bulletin 27864) expects the anti-virus market as a whole to grow at 15.3% annually between 2001 and 2006. Sophos`s revenue grew at 40% last fiscal year, thus demonstrating the company`s continued success in the highly competitive anti-virus market. The company has enjoyed consecutive years of impressive and steady growth. Since 1994, Sophos has experienced a compound annual revenue growth of 44% and a compound pre-tax profits growth of 47%.
"Given the downturn in the economy and the technology sector, and with the cut backs in IT spending, we are thrilled to report record growth," commented Jan Hruska, CEO of Sophos Plc. "As a corporate-focused, anti-virus only vendor, our growth validates the relevance and value of our unique offering to organisations worldwide and the strength of our business model."
Last year, Sophos implemented a global OEM team to further develop and service worldwide technology partners. This followed increasing demand within the marketplace, and Sophos expanded its OEM service and support worldwide to accommodate third-party developer interest.
Many of Sophos`s strategic partners contributed to Sophos`s success in 2002 including:
* CipherTrust, a developer of IronMail, a security appliance for corporate e-mail systems.
* Elron Software Inc, a provider of a comprehensive set of solutions for e-mail and spam content filtering, as well as Web access control.
* ESoft, a provider of simplified Internet security solutions offering organisations a complete suite of modular Internet security applications.
* Mirapoint, a provider of dedicated e-mail servers, which simplify the delivery of web and wireless messaging services, whilst providing hardened e-mail security through intelligent anti-spam and anti-virus filtering.
* Ositis Software Inc, a developer of security and Internet access technologies.
* Qubux, a provider of server appliance software, which extends anti-virus protection in conjunction with its Internet filtering solution for Sun Microsystems Linux platforms, as well as other providers of Linux based server appliances.
* Stalker Software, a messaging solutions technology provider.
* Sybari, a developer of Antigen, a comprehensive anti-virus, content-filtering and e-mail security solution for messaging and collaboration platforms.
* United Messaging, an outsourced messaging provider, messaging and e-mail application service provider.
Sophos has a wide range of nearly 100 OEM partnerships. Sophos, unlike most anti-virus vendors, avoids partnering conflicts by not competing in other areas such as content filtering, anti-spam and firewalls. Sophos has built a solid reputation for its dependable, high performance anti-virus solutions, as well as its ease of doing business within this industry.
Additionally, Sophos in 2002 received two Queen`s Awards for Enterprise in the categories of `Innovation` and `International Trade`. Sophos`s anti-virus products have received accolades and certifications from independent testing bodies such as ICSA Labs, West Coast Labs, AV-Test.Org and Virus Bulletin. Sophos also had several positive reviews from Federal Computer Week, InfoWorld, Le Monde Informatique, PC Pro, Network News and SC Magazine.
For further information, please contact Brett Myroff at telephone +27 11 444 4000; fax +27 11 444 7000; e-mail brettm@netxactics.co.za
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NetXactics is a South African-based company, focused on the provision of security solutions. It is the sole distributor in Sub-Saharan Africa for UK-based Sophos Plc, one of the leaders in the provision of anti-virus software for the corporate environment, and for Australian-based WebSpy Ltd, formerly Livingstone Group, and the developers Internet Access Management applications. For more information, visit NetXactics at www.netxactics.co.za.
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