MEDIA RELEASE 23 August 2004

Focus on SME email security delivers solid growth to MailGuard

MailGuard, Australia's first and leading provider of outsourced email anti-virus, anti-spam, content filtering and email storage solutions for the SME market, has experienced three years of solid growth in company size and revenue. In June, the company celebrated its 600th customer and opened its Sydney office.

Founded in 2001, MailGuard has seen demand for its services increase as businesses seek secure, service-oriented and easy-to-manage solutions for their email networks. The company has experienced consistent year-over-year revenue growth since its inception.

Today, MailGuard is filtering over 750,000 emails daily. Companies across multiple industry segments have adopted MailGuard's services as a means to dramatically simplify management, protect against spam, viruses and unwanted emails in order to provide enhanced messaging capabilities.

MailGuard requires no hardware, software, installation or ongoing management and costs approx. $199 setup fee, and between $2.95 to $5.50 person per month. "That's $55 per month for a business with 10 people, and $199 once off setup. With the average staff member spending 30 minutes a day dealing with spam, I imagine that this is a pretty good return on investment even for small to medium business!" says Andrew Johnson, MailGuard's Marketing Director.

IT Manager of JB HI-FI, MailGuard's 600th customer, Geoff Craig, said, "With email increasingly a mission-critical application for our day-to-day business activity, security management of our incoming and outgoing email was a major concern to us. But it had to be an external solution that proactively and continuously managed all of the company's email correspondence. We're a small IT team and I cannot afford to have one of my guys virtually spending their entire time looking after email security issues."

Within four weeks of implementation of the MailGuard solution, JB HI-FI staff productivity levels rose due to the fact that spam has virtually disappeared and Craig's team can turn off or on what the users are able to receive via email. Further benefits include the fact that Craig can access the JB HI-FI email activity status and statistics remotely through the web-enabled portal and that substantial processing time has been freed up from his mail server.

"We estimate that 60 percent of internally and externally related business information is stored within corporate messaging systems," says Johnson. "And it can only continue to rise as our dependency on email communications increases."

In March this year MailGuard launched SafeGuard®, an outsourced business email archival solution. Today, the company has 100 customers using the SafeGuard service. "In today's business world, email holds a company's critical information. Emails record financial expectations, sales are made, customers make complaints and companies make promises. These are legal documents regularly used in HR, privacy and financial matters. The solid demand we are experiencing is proof that awareness and understanding of the importance of storing email data has really hit the SME sector," said Johnson.

Multiplex Limited adopted the SafeGuard service over six months ago and has 1,300 users' email archived by MailGuard. Chris Clark, Group IT Manager, maintains "Organisations are simply unaware of the costs involved in archiving and retrieving emails. It is much more than the initial purchase of one or two servers. To enable a structured approach to archiving and retrieval of your company's emails requires a dedicated person designing and maintaining a process adhered to so as to ensure access to essential but corrupt or lost emails can be retrieved virtually immediately."

And that's the attraction of SafeGuard to organisations such as the Geelong Advertiser, Australian Retailers Association and Regional Air Express. SafeGuard automatically provides a centralised archive of all an organisation's incoming and outgoing emails - without any hardware, software or installation requirements or investment. All correspondence filters through MailGuard's servers and the archiving is undertaken externally. On a monthly basis, each SafeGuard client receives an encrypted CD or DVD with a copy of every email the organisation has sent or received.

"MailGuard has built a solid foundation of customers by focusing on three core tenets: service delivery, security and simplicity," said Johnson. "Given tight IT budgets for SMEs, increased concerns around email security and pressures to make past IT investments deliver on promised ROI, we are confident that small to medium businesses will continue to be drawn to our outsourced email solutions to secure message networks against spam and virus attacks, as well as enforce policies and route messages."

- ENDS -

Issued by Rivers of Communication
On behalf of MailGuard

Media enquiries
Craig McDonald, Director of Strategy, MailGuard, tel: +61 3 9694 4444
Dolores Diez, Rivers of Communication, tel: +61 3 9572 4552 / 0417 330 881
email: dolores@riversofcom.com