FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE February 2006

MailGuard launches strengthened partner Program

Intensifies strategic partnerships

MailGuard, Australia's first and leading provider of managed email anti-virus, anti-spam, content filtering and email storage solutions for the small to medium business market, has kick started 2006 with the launch of its revamped MailGuard Partner Program.

"We have been working on and refining the Program over the last six months and have involved current partners so as the new program reflects and addresses their needs. It's not about expansion as much as about managing channel efforts and servicing MailGuard Partners better," said Craig McDonald, MailGuard's Director of Strategy. "We know the SME space better than any other managed information services provider, having been the first company to launch such a managed service five years ago in Australia."

McDonald adds that, for customers, MailGuard means they don't have to have the expensive IT back-end to run the high level of managed email security with which they are provided while partners get the stability of recurring revenues. MailGuard has spent the last six months investing in its back-end systems to create a platform better capable of integrating a variety of different partner requirements so as their services provider model delivers ease of use in billing systems and technical support services to its partners.

Additionally, today, the company's breadth of products means partners can offer their customers more than just an anti-spam and anti-virus solution. The company also offers managed desktop security, web filtering and an advanced archiving service. "And this is where all organisations are heading due to compliance and regulatory issues," said McDonald. The weekly and monthly reports, based on filtering activity during the specified period, provides quantifiable reasons of the value of the service and provides genuine value to the customer.

The company has appointed Cathrine Greive as its National Partner Manager to manage the new program which incorporates tier 1 and tier 2 MailGuard Reseller and MailGuard Service Provider (MSP) levels as well as a growing wholesale community. Greive brings to MailGuard extensive experience in working with resellers and partners within the IT and finance industries. Two channel support staff have also joined MailGuard.

McDonald is confident that the MailGuard Partner Program has everything resellers, large and small, need to deliver its industry-leading managed email security solutions to their customers. The new program is focused on assisting the partners to generate high-margin recurring revenues by reselling MailGuard's managed email security (anti spam, antivirus content filtering and archival solutions) and browsing filtering services for their customers.

"The partners identify straight away the value add they can provide to their business customers by offering our managed service. Email traffic entering and exiting mailboxes each day continues to grow exponentially as companies increasingly conduct their business via emails. There's no doubt that the small to medium business market is today aware of the criticality of email as the communication tool of choice and its impact on business performance," said McDonald. "Larger organisations are also approaching us to eliminate threats and unwanted email before impacting their network."

MailGuard opened a Sydney office in late 2004 and set up its Brisbane office in the second half of 2005. "From the very beginning, our strategy has been to grow the indirect channel. At this five year juncture, we have a healthy community of partners who are essential to us in penetrating the market broadly and rapidly and we need to nurture and assist them," said McDonald. Today, the balance between direct and indirect sits at 35-65 per cent with MailGuard looking to be at 25-75 per cent direct-indirect by the end of 2006.

The majority of Queensland activity is leveraged through MailGuard's national channel partners such as destra Business and Rosser Communications. The company is also working with such Queensland based partners as WebSecure (Cairns), Comparto (Brisbane) and PortNet (Port of Brisbane Internet Provider).

MailGuard filtered more than 700 million email messages in 2005. Today, MailGuard filters over 2,000,000 emails daily and protects over 40,000 people against viruses, spam, mail bomb/email denial of service attacks and hackers as well as providing email filtering/management and usage statistics.

December 2005 saw the company stop 31 million viruses from entering thousands of businesses' desktops during the SoberZ virus breakout whilst stopping over 27 million spam for the same period. "Total bandwidth and storage reduction and associated costs for our clients was over 2.3 terabytes for this period," concluded McDonald.

More details about MailGuard's Partner Program can be found at www.mailguard.com.au/partner. Companies wishing to apply to join the program can do so by completing the online registration form.

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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