Sophos, a world leader in protecting business against viruses,
spyware and spam, today announced an increase in annual turnover of
19.2% to £66.2 million ($122.6 million USD) for the year ending
March 2005. Sophos has achieved year-on-year growth, ahead of the
industry average, thanks to strong market demand for its integrated
IT security solutions.
The growth comes from a significant number of new customer wins
from large organisations around the world, including Heinz,
Marconi, Wellesley College, EFS, Zodiac, Acens, Adecco, Radio
Televisión Española, Australian National University, Philippine
Airlines, Northern Ireland's Directorate of Information Systems and
University Technology Malaysia.
Sophos's growth looks set to increase further with the
forthcoming launches of its new centrally managed client firewall
and adware detection and removal products in this fiscal year. It
will release significant new versions of its enterprise endpoint
protection solutions, which will provide advanced virus, spyware,
adware and firewall protection for file servers, desktops and
laptops on a wide range of platforms. The company will also launch
a cutting-edge solution for the Linux operating system with
on-access virus scanning and supporting a large number of Linux
platforms.
"Sophos is constantly innovating to deliver first-rate
protection to all types of organisations - proving especially
strong in the education and public sectors. Our impressive track
record has made us world leaders in protecting business networks
against the ever-evolving threats to IT security," said Steve
Munford, Chief Operating Officer at Sophos. "The nature of
threats is changing - we're seeing more and more targeted,
financially-motivated attacks against organisations. Our strong
market presence and channel strategy give new customers confidence
when deploying our software, while our impressive detection rates
and good customer service play a big part in our high
customer-retention rates."
The last fiscal year saw Sophos's global workforce rise to 925
employees - an increase of 26% on the previous year. Sophos has
also recruited industry veteran Mark Harris as
Global Director of SophosLabs. Harris previously worked at McAfee
and brings more than nine years of IT security experience to
Sophos. Other major appointments include Wendy Dean as
Vice President of Engineering, Charles Southey as Vice
President of IT, Mark Hatton as
President of North America, Stuart
Small as the UK Director of Sales and Marketing, and Steve
Munford as Chief Operating Officer.
SophosLabs™,
Sophos's global network of threat analysis centres, is growing at a
steady rate and dealing with increasingly complex threats. Sophos
is also growing its development department, which has introduced
several new products to the market this year.
Sophos's enterprise range of software,
which protects each entry point on the network, was launched in
February 2005 and has already proved very successful. The company's
recently launched Genotype™ detection technology allows
organisations to further reduce exposure to unidentified threats
and unwanted content by the use of forensic analysis to identify
suspicious patterns and characteristics that are unique to either a
virus family or a spam campaign. Most recently, Sophos launched
PhishAlert™ service, which
provides fast, near real-time alerts of phishing campaigns, and
ZombieAlert™ service, which
identifies infected machines that give control to unauthorised
users. Sophos is the first vendor of its kind to offer such a
service.
Sophos's achievements have been recognised in several business
and industry award wins in the
last year. It won the 2004 Queen's Award for Enterprise in
International Trade and was ranked 35th in Business Week's Europe
500 list. Sophos also received its 29th Virus Bulletin 100%
award.
In 2005, Sophos has joined the Anti-Phishing Workgroup (APWG)
and the Anti-Spyware Coalition (ASC) among other industry associations.
Having being one of the first companies to attain spyware
certification, Sophos now analyses and protects against more than
500 new spyware samples every month.
More than 100 million users in 150 countries rely on Sophos as the best protection against complex threats and data loss. Sophos is committed to providing security and data protection solutions that are simple to manage, deploy and use and that deliver the industry's lowest total cost of ownership. Sophos offers award-winning encryption, endpoint security, web, email, and network access control solutions backed by SophosLabs - a global network of threat intelligence centers. With more than two decades of experience, Sophos is regarded as a leader in security and data protection by top analyst firms and has received many industry awards.
Sophos is headquartered in Boston, US and Oxford, UK. More information is available at www.sophos.com.