Tumbleweed Communications Corp. provided secure messaging and secure file transfer solutions for enterprise and government customers. The company became a publicly traded company in 1999, trading on the NASDAQ stock exchange under the symbol TMWD. Tumbleweed Communications merged with Axway, a subsidiary of Sopra Group, in 2008. Tumbleweed products were used to block security threats, protect information, and conduct business online. Tumbleweed provided solutions for inbound and outbound email protection, secure file routing, and identity validation that allow organizations to conduct business over the Internet. Tumbleweed offered these solutions in three product suites: MailGate, SecureTransport, and Validation Authority. MailGate provides protection against spam, viruses, and attacks, and enables policy-based message filtering, encryption, and routing. SecureTransport enables customers to safely exchange large files and transactions without proprietary software. Validation Authority determines the validity of digital certificates. Tumbleweed had approximately 2,300 enterprise and government customers. Their market focus had been in the financial services, health care, and government.

Merger

* Axway Software acquired Tumbleweed in 2008. * Tumbleweed acquired Corvigo in 2004. With the acquisition, Tumbleweed gained the

Linux Linux ( ) is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an kernel (operating system), operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically package manager, pac ...

-based anti-spam appliance MailGate. * Tumbleweed acquired Valicert in 2003. The Valicert SecureTransport product was added to Tumbleweed's security suite. * Tumbleweed acquired Worldtalk in 2000.

Revenue

In 2005, Tumbleweed earned approximately $US 50 million in

gross revenue In accounting, revenue is the total amount of income generated by the sale of product (business), goods and services related to the primary operations of a business. Commercial revenue may also be referred to as sales or as turnover. Some compan ...

from the sale of their products and services. Of that, approximately $US 3 million was from

licensing A license (American English) or licence ( Commonwealth English) is an official permission or permit to do, use, or own something (as well as the document of that permission or permit). A license is granted by a party (licensor) to another par ...

their

patent A patent is a type of intellectual property that gives its owner the legal right to exclude others from making, using, or selling an invention for a limited period of time in exchange for publishing an sufficiency of disclosure, enabling discl ...

s.
In 2006, Tumbleweed reported $US 62 million in revenue, with revenue growth over one year of 24%. In 2007, Tumbleweed reported $US 57.50 million in revenue, with revenue growth over one year of -7.30%.

Awards

In January 2007, Tumbleweed's MailGate 5550 was named '' SC Magazine''’s Best of 2006 "Recommended" award in the Anti-

Spam Spam most often refers to: * Spam (food), a consumer brand product of canned processed pork of the Hormel Foods Corporation * Spamming, unsolicited or undesired electronic messages ** Email spam, unsolicited, undesired, or illegal email messages ...

category.

Patents

Tumbleweed has a patent portfolio including 22 utility patents and one issued US

design patent In the United States, a design patent is a form of legal protection granted to the ornamental design of an article of manufacture. Design patents are a type of industrial design right. Ornamental designs of jewelry, furniture, beverage containers ...

. US patent 6192407 is one of several owned by Tumbleweed that relates to document delivery systems that generate a unique

URL A uniform resource locator (URL), colloquially known as an address on the Web, is a reference to a resource that specifies its location on a computer network and a mechanism for retrieving it. A URL is a specific type of Uniform Resource Identi ...

for intended recipients of a document in order to deliver that document. Tumbleweed has licensed this and related patents in their patent portfolio to 29 companies. They filed several

patent infringement A patent is a type of intellectual property that gives its owner the legal right to exclude others from making, using, or selling an invention for a limited period of time in exchange for publishing an enabling disclosure of the invention."A ...

lawsuits A lawsuit is a proceeding by one or more parties (the plaintiff or claimant) against one or more parties (the defendant) in a civil court of law. The archaic term "suit in law" is found in only a small number of laws still in effect today. T ...

. Those that have been sued include: *

PayPal PayPal Holdings, Inc. is an American multinational financial technology company operating an online payments system in the majority of countries that support E-commerce payment system, online money transfers; it serves as an electronic alter ...

, This suit has been

settled A settler or a colonist is a person who establishes or joins a permanent presence that is separate to existing communities. The entity that a settler establishes is a settlement. A settler is called a pioneer if they are among the first settli ...

. Terms of the settlement have not been disclosed. *

Hallmark Cards Hallmark Cards, Inc. is a Privately held company, privately held, family-owned American company based in Kansas City, Missouri. Founded in 1910 by Joyce Hall, Hallmark is one of the oldest and largest manufacturers of greeting cards in the United ...

, This suit has been settled. Hallmark agreed to take a license. *

Yahoo! Yahoo (, styled yahoo''!'' in its logo) is an American web portal that provides the search engine Yahoo Search and related services including My Yahoo, Yahoo Mail, Yahoo News, Yahoo Finance, Yahoo Sports, y!entertainment, yahoo!life, and its a ...

and HSBC Bank USA, This suit has been settled. The terms have been described by Yahoo! and HSBC lawyers as favorable to Yahoo! and HSBC. *DST Systems and NewRiver This suit has been settled. DST Systems and NewRiver will pay Tumbleweed four cents for each delivery of electronic information using a personalized, trackable URL. Overall, Tumbleweed earns about 6% of its revenue from patent licensing.

Competitors

Major competitors of Tumbleweed included:Hoovers Inc. profile of Tumbleweed Communications March 12, 2007
/ref> * Sterling Commerce *

Trend Micro is an American-Japanese cyber security software company. The company has globally dispersed R&D in 16 locations across every continent excluding Antarctica. The company develops enterprise security software for servers, containers, and cloud ...

*Zix

Representative customers

Representative customers of Tumbleweed included: * UBS *

Bank of America The Bank of America Corporation (Bank of America) (often abbreviated BofA or BoA) is an American multinational investment banking, investment bank and financial services holding company headquartered at the Bank of America Corporate Center in ...

JPMorgan Chase JPMorgan Chase & Co. (stylized as JPMorganChase) is an American multinational financial services, finance corporation headquartered in New York City and incorporated in Delaware. It is List of largest banks in the United States, the largest ba ...

* The Regence Group *

Aetna Aetna Inc. ( ) is an American managed health care company that sells traditional and consumer directed health care insurance and related services, such as medical, pharmaceutical, dental, behavioral health, long-term care, and disability plans, ...

References

External links

*{{Official homepage Information technology companies of the United States Companies based in Redwood City, California