Anti-virus software vendor Trend Micro said on Tuesday that it purchased Kelkea Inc., of San Jose, Calif., which makes technology that identifies the source of online threats.
Trend Micro Inc.s Cupertino, Calif.-based U.S. subsidiary acquired Kelkea last week for an undisclosed sum.
Trend plans to use the companys IP filtering and online reputation technology to develop products and services that fight phishing, pharming, botnets and other emerging threats, the company said in a statement.
“This really fits together with our strategy of integrating security into the network layer,” said Evan Chen, CEO and co-founder of Trend Micro.
Kelkea sells anti-spam services that use the companys database of 1.5 billion IP addresses and proprietary filtering technology to identify the source of inbound e-mail messages.
The technology reduces the strain of spam messages on corporate infrastructure by enabling Kelkea customers to drop invalid connections before the e-mail reaches their network, Chen said.
“The statistics were seeing indicate that 80 percent of the spam can be rejected outright using the IP reputation services,” Chen said.
Kelkeas products are used by around half of the consumer ISPs in the United States, as well as companies ranging from Fortune 500 enterprises to small businesses, said Dave Rand, Kelkeas chairman and founder.
Rand will take over as Trends chief technologist of Internet content security.
Trend will also absorb most of Kelkeas 20 employees, Rand said.
Trend will launch Kelkeas anti-spam service under its own name in June.
The company plans to unveil a new version of its Internet Mail Security Suite that integrates the Kelkea technology in the third quarter 2005, Chen said.
By 2006, Trend hopes to offer a whole suite of products that use the Kelkea technology for protection against online threats like phishing Web sites and botnets of compromised computers, Rand said.
Those services will sit beside and complement the companys existing gateway security products.
“People will still need anti-virus and anti-spam scanners that give them finer control over the content they want to receive. After all, one persons spam is another persons legitimate e-mail,” she said.