MessageLabs Launches Global Brand Campaign; New Advertising Campaign Debuts to Increase Awareness of Managed Services that Stop Spam, Viruses and Porn Outside the Corporate Network.

Business Editors

NEW YORK--(BUSINESS WIRE)--April 6, 2004

MessageLabs, the leading provider of managed email security services to businesses worldwide, has launched a global advertising and marketing campaign to build its brand in one of the fastest growing technology markets today.

The campaign kicked off in early April and is running in the United States and across Europe. Using a range of print and online media, the ads feature people 'pointing out' to the most logical place to stop costly and damaging Internet security threats--spam, viruses, phishing scams and other unwanted and malicious content.

One ad shows a man on top of a glass building pointing out to a headline that reads, 'MessageLabs announces the end of emails you didn't ask for, from people you don't know, for things you didn't want.' Another features the very space-age looking Lloyds Building in Central London with a headline, 'Where's the best place on earth to protect your email?'

The pointing concept--and the tagline 'Turning Email Security Inside Out'--plays on the fact that MessageLabs' services operate at the Internet level, keeping threats completely outside of and away from internal networks.

MessageLabs' managed services offer technical and financial advantages over desktop and gateway products--many of which were designed in the pre-Internet era and cannot respond quickly or at all to dynamic, fast-changing and native email security threats. These products stop threats closer to end users and do nothing to reduce spam bandwidth consumption and processing costs, and are literally wide open doors for new virus and malware infections.

"The email security landscape is changing with a greater number of companies adopting managed services as the best and in some cases only way to stop threats that emanate from the Internet. In launching a multinational, multimillion-dollar ad campaign, the largest in our industry, MessageLabs is again setting the competitive bar. This is but one of many strategic initiatives we are launching to promote the benefits of managed services and solidify our market leading position," said Jos White, president, MessageLabs Americas.

Mason Zimbler in the United Kingdom created the print ads, which will run in BusinessWeek, Information Week, Bank Technology News, Computing, SC Magazine, Information Age and a dozen other media outlets. The ads feature some of the company's 8,500 customers worldwide, including The Federal Reserve Bank of New York, the British Government, Computer Sciences Corporation (CSC), EMI Music, Bertelsmann and Conde Nast Publications.

MessageLabs is simultaneously launching new online, direct mail and telemarketing campaigns to drive decision makers to Web sites promoting 30-day evaluations of the services. More than 90% of all businesses, universities and government agencies that trial MessageLabs' anti-spam, anti-virus and porn filtering services become customers.

Farstar Marketing of Richardson, Texas and Digital Pulp of New York City created the lead-generation campaigns that are running in the states.

Founded in the U.K. in late 1999, MessageLabs owns 55% of the managed email security services market--based on current run rate revenues of $45 million globally--and is the third largest player in the email security market, according to The Yankee Group.

With 77% brand awareness among UK IT decision makers, the company expects to drive additional demand for its services in the United States. The company opened its North American headquarters in New York City one year ago this month and has since grown its U.S. customer base 175% and revenues 300%.

In today's computing environment, multi-faceted threats come from all directions and require a multi-layered security approach. MessageLabs provides a critical first-line of defense against threats at the Internet layer and eliminates virus vulnerability windows inherent with desktop and gateway products. Clients regularly report significant investment returns as part of the service.

"A number of organizations are using managed services to secure their e-mail systems because they filter out threats at the Internet layer before they reach the enterprise network," said Maurene Caplan Grey, research director at Gartner, Inc.

"Such an approach requires no upfront infrastructure investment and can be implemented quickly, which can be particularly attractive when the enterprise wants a problem, such as spam or e-mail malicious code, to be fixed now."

According to the Yankee Group, "Although the need for e-mail content filtering is driven by the sharp increase in spam and Sobig-type viruses, the benefits have not stopped there. Antispam solutions are improving overall network security without adding administrative burden to e-mail or virus teams."

About MessageLabs

MessageLabs is the leading provider of managed email security services to businesses worldwide. The company currently protects more than 8,500 businesses worldwide from email threats such as viruses, spam and other unwanted content before they reach their networks and without requiring additional hardware or software. Powered by a global network of control towers that currently spans the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, the Netherlands and Hong Kong, MessageLabs scans tens of millions of emails a day on behalf of customers such as The British Government, The Bank of New York, EMI Music, HealthPartners, StorageTek, Air Products and Chemicals, SC Johnson, Conde Nast Publications, Fujitsu and Diageo. For more information on MessageLabs and its industry-leading email security and management services, please visit www.messagelabs.com.