Although I was aware of this deal being concluded over a week ago I wasn’t able to let on.  As its now being widely reported online I can confirm that Ipswitch has acquired MessageWay as the Managed File Transfer marketplace consolidates again after other recent mergers/acquisitions.  Its going to be interesting to see how much more activity between MFT vendors there will be over the coming months.

Here are some further details as penned by Gary Shottes of Ipswitch.

Acquisition will pave the way for more secure application-to-application communications, partners say

Ipswitch Inc., a maker of secure, managed file transfer products and services, today will announce that it has acquired MessageWay Solutions Inc., a provider of managed file transfer and business integration solutions. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

With the addition of MessageWay to its product family, Ipswitch will provide a wide range of secure file transfer services and capabilities, including of advanced analytics, enterprise-wide monitoring, and high-performance data translation and transformation for EDI, ERP, and a variety of other message formats, the companies said.

“When people in the industry talk about security, one of the things that they don’t often mention is that about 30 percent of the exchanges that go on between companies are exchanges of files between applications, not between people sitting at a desk typing at a computer,” says Greg Faubert, president of MessageWay. “This is an area that’s becoming more important all the time.”

“The file transfer market is changing, not only in the volume and size of messages, but in the way they are handled,” says Gary Shottes, president of Ipswitch. “The worlds of managed file transfer, EDI, and middleware, which have typically been handled by different vendors, are converging. We think we’ll be in a position to take market share away from all of those more focused players, by offering solutions that provide a more integrated approach.” The need for managed file transfer is increasing as organizations look for ways to meet industry and regulatory requirements such as SOX, PCI, FISMA, and HIPAA, the executives said. Many enterprises need a better way to show a “chain of custody” on file transfers, proving to auditors that data is safe as it travels between partners.

“What we offer is the ability to exchange files securely through the DMZ without the file ever landing on disk,” Flaubert says. “Companies can submit files or retrieve files through an open protocol, but without the file ever residing in the red zone.

“Once the data gets to its destination, it’s encrypted and housed in a secure database,” Flaubert explains. “The only way for an attacker to get into those files would be for them to have access to the physical disk, all of the encryption keys, and a copy of our software.”

Ipswitch expects its combined offerings to get traction in industries where secure file transfer is required, such as financial services, government, and healthcare.

Click here for further information on the range of products by Ipswitch File Transfer or call Pro2col Sales on 0333 123 1240

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So why FTP and what’s so great about it?  Well to be honest this isn’t necessarily a blog to evangelise FTP but more the way in which it works, lets call it ’sending files’.  With many businesses looking to adopt Managed File Transfer solutions, I thought it might be worth redressing the balance and putting things into perspective.  Managed File Transfer solutions have many good features but in the case of email based ones, sending files isn’t one of them.  In many cases the Managed File Transfer solution doesn’t actually send anything, rather it asks the company email server to send an email to a particular recipient.  The person receiving the email clicks on a link within the email to download the file or goes to a web site to log-in and manually download the file – so you see the responsibility is on the recipient to download the file and given this, there is no guarantee that the file will get there.  In fact there’s no guarantee the email is going to get there at all, asking the recipient to download the file(s).  Whilst Managed File Transfer solutions cater for the majority of ‘file transfer’ uses it is certainly not the right solution for every scenario.

So what do I mean by ’sending files’.   Well, historically the majority of solutions used to send files required a connection to be created between two sites and the files to be pushed/transferred to the receiving site using the appropriate delivery protocol for the connection method, e.g. Modem, ISDN or IP.   A typical example that many people would be able to relate to is FTP.  A user with an FTP client enters the details for the server, connects, selects the files to transfer, drags them over to the ‘remote server’ window (in many FTP client softwares) and the transferring of files starts straight away.  Once all of the files have been transferred you can see them on the remote server, they are there without question, the files have been delivered.

In contrast, Managed File Transfer solutions that use email messaging to deliver a message to request the download of the files, has several potential points of failure.  You’ve got to rely on two email servers to be happy to deliver the message and not overburdened with other requests, you have to ensure that SPAM filters don’t whisk away your all important message and probably most importantly – someone has to be there to open, read and perform the manual process of downloading the file.

In short FTP file transfer has a place in the enterprise.  If you want to be able to push data to a location with or without manual intervention, then FTP or another file transfer protocol with similar features will do.  Certain business to business situations will rely on data being sent from one location to the next e.g. a publisher to his printer, where time is of the essence and any doubt about the delivery of the data has to be avoided.

Finally it is possible to make FTP more functional and secure than many Managed File Transfer vendors make out, in fact some Managed File Transfer vendors have it built in.  Depending upon the solution you implement, you can get some great functionality to compliment this old delivery protocol and its also possible to integrate with workflow solutions, script integration and utilise API’s and SDK’s for complete integration.

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