Andrew Johnson, marketing director at MailGuard and Nick Hawkins, MessageLabs Asia-Pacific managing director -- the leaders of two popular managed e-mail services specialists -- go head to head.
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Hawkins: What do you see as the future of e-mail messaging security, based on the issues that your customers face?
Johnson: Nick, it's funny (and probably quite appropriate) that this is your first question as this was the underpinning question that resulted in the founding of MailGuard.
MailGuard was born from an understanding of the issues, technology, and solutions involved in how very large corporations managed e-mail security challenges, and the observation that "this is just not going to work" for many of our smaller corporate clients.
However, having a clear vision of the issues that our smaller corporate clients faced in responding to IT concerns and threats, we were able to draw on our experience and apply our technology to design and implement an outsource business model. Today MailGuard provides effective e-mail security, reporting, and protection required without the crippling ongoing management and infrastructure requirements.
MailGuard continues to innovate by continuously engaging our clients for input and feedback, and also observing the success (and failure) of large corporations and early adopters when they are faced with many "bleeding edge" issues -- which often become issues for our clients six months to a year down the track.
As businesses adopt the use of more sophisticated electronic communications and various platforms (such as Instant Messaging and SMS) to improve their productivity, there will be an ongoing and increasing challenge to maintain security. Through our ongoing R&D efforts, MailGuard is confident it will be there to meet any new challenges facing our customers.
Johnson: How do you convince organisations, large and small, that antivirus, anti-spam protection starts outside their network when faced with the traditional model of server-based or appliance security solutions?
Hawkins: Our unique selling points -- 100 percent guarantee against infection from any e-mail virus, which no software or hardware solution can match; the ability to provide a level of protection against spam and viruses no individual company could afford in-house; and our global resources with local implementation -- often get us through the door to potential customers.
However, we work on a consultative basis with organisations to understand their particular situation and often find that some of the lesser-known benefits of MessageLabs' service really make the difference. Plus, we deliver through global partners like IBM, MCI, and Dimension Data, so our customers benefit from acquiring all their IT needs from a single vendor and often end up bundling solutions to give them a comprehensive package.
Hawkins:
MailGuard is a successful Australian business. What is your strategy, if any, for expansion out of Australia?
Johnson:
MailGuard still has many opportunities within Australia as we expand via our three offices (Melbourne, Sydney, and Brisbane). Additionally, our initiatives in working with Australian Business Limited (ABL) have revealed that there are many businesses in regional Australia eager to adopt a service such as ours.
Today, we are servicing customers in over 15 different countries -- the majority are affiliated to our Australian customers but a growing number are overseas-based organisations. Countries we service include South Africa, USA, Denmark, UK, Japan, New Zealand, India, and China.
We are currently implementing our International Channel Partner Program and are already achieving successful outcomes in NZ, UK, and Ireland as well as the outer Asia-Pacific regions. Fundamentally, our business model delivers to us and to our customers ongoing scalability with regard to user numbers. Location is not an issue with providing service to organisations.
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