Lynnfield, MA - Sophos, a world leader in integrated threat
management solutions, today announced the company's financial
results for fiscal year 2005. The company reported an increase in
annual revenue of 19.2% to £66.2 million ($122.6 million USD), with
the North America subsidiary contributing 31% of the overall
worldwide revenue.
The company's continued growth is attributed to strategic
investments in product research and development, key additions to
the company's executive team, as well as industry-unique product
offerings. Sophos continued to focus on supporting its customer
base, which includes FORTUNE 500 clients, while adding new
customers this year such as Heinz Company (NYSE:HNZ) and Wellesley
College.
As part of the company's executive team expansion, Steve
Munford, formerly president for North America, was appointed as the
company's chief operating officer and Mark Hatton was appointed to
president, Sophos North America. Sophos also appointed former
McAfee executive Mark Harris as director of SophosLabs, Sophos's
growing global network of threat analysis centers. At McAfee,
Harris was director of engineering for the company's spam products.
Charles Southey was named vice president of IT and Wendy Dean was
appointed vice president of engineering to drive the future
direction of Sophos's integrated product line.
In fiscal year 2005, Sophos announced major advances to its
enterprise-class product line that includes protection for each
entry point on the network. The company launched Genotype™
detection technology, allowing organizations to further reduce
exposure to unidentified threats and unwanted content. This
technology uses forensic analysis to identify suspicious patterns
and characteristics that are unique to either a virus family or a
spam campaign. Sophos was also one of the first companies to attain
spyware certification and now analyzes and protects against more
than 500 new spyware samples every month. Sophos also introduced
its ZombieAlert™ and PhishAlert™ services. ZombieAlert is the first
service of its kind to identify "zombie" computers on an
organization's network. PhishAlert is an early-warning system that
notifies online businesses of new phishing scams targeting their
customers.
"The past year we've seen the number of new threats increase
significantly and the nature of those threats is changing. We're
seeing an escalation in targeted, financially-motivated attacks
against organizations," said Mark Hatton, president of Sophos,
North America. "Companies now need to look at new integrated
defense strategies to protect themselves. This year we've focused
on investing in SophosLabs™ cross-threat expertise and have taken
an integrated multi-tier approach to threat management to ensure
our customers in corporate, education and government organizations
continue to be protected now and in the future."
"Sophos is providing a unified solution that consolidates robust
protection across all the vulnerable tiers so users can avoid the
expense and uncertainty of integrating a range of solutions from
different vendors," said Chris Christiansen, IDC VP of Security
Products.
Sophos's growth is projected to increase in fiscal year 2006
with the release of new security products including new versions of
enterprise solutions, with added firewall, adware and gateway
protection capabilities delivered early next year.
Sophos is headquartered in Boston, US and Oxford, UK. More information is available at www.sophos.com.