ACC switches on locally-developed anti spam, virus

Media release
13th November 2008
ACC switches on locally-developed SMX anti spam and anti virus service

The Accident Compensation Corporation has implemented the New Zealand-developed SMX anti spam and anti virus service across its 2,500 desktops – solving a spam problem totalling more than 15 million messages a month.

The ACC’s ICT operations manager, Glen Rhodes, says spam volumes had been increasing rapidly, clogging the network and slowing email delivery. The ACC’s existing solution was struggling to deal with the increasing load, and users were complaining of a four to five hour delay in receiving emails.

“The SMX service has solved the problem overnight. Email now arrives, clean and without delays. We’re delighted,” Rhodes says.

The decision to trial SMX followed a detailed review of available anti spam and anti virus options, Rhodes says. These included software installed on the ACC’s own network, as well as service based solutions.

“What appealed with the SMX service was that unwanted messages are cleaned before mail reaches our network, Rhodes says. “The SMX reporting features allow you to see exactly what messages are being filtered out, and this, for the first time, allowed us to understand the huge volume of spam messages that had been loading up our servers and our users. The problem was bigger than we thought.”

He says the SMX service has a number of strengths compared to alternative solutions. “Contracting a service to deal with spam and viruses means we don’t have to buy and maintain software on our own network –this means we can free up our internal staff. We’re also impressed by the accuracy of the service – guaranteeing more than 99 percent accuracy in cleaning mail is impressive. The SMX service was also simple and fast to implement, up and running in just a matter of days. Provisioning of new users is also very fast and easy, taking literally minutes.”

SMX managing director and co-founder Jesse Ball says the decision by ACC to implement the SMX service demonstrates the ability of SMX to win business against the best local and international anti spam and anti virus solutions.

“This is a highly strategic sale for SMX, as we hope that other Government departments and SOEs will be encouraged by the ACC’s successful trial and implementation of the SMX service.”

He says local growth is being matched by international growth with recent licensing agreements signed with Symantec, and with India’s largest ICT company, CMC Limited. The licensing agreement with CMC gives CMC a licence to resell SMX service throughout India, the Middle East and Africa. The CMC deal alone is expected to double SMX’s current customer numbers inside three years.

Also this year local reseller agreements were concluded with Gen-i franchisees, Axon and Unisys.

About SMX
Launched in February 2006, SMX is a privately-owned secure email software development and services company. The SMX proposition is to clean mail of viruses and spam to 99.97 percent accuracy. The conceptual innovation is to offer this ‘99.97 percent clean’customer outcome as a service, paid for on a monthly per user basis, rather than as a software product installed on a customer’s own system and requiring IT staff to upgrade, maintain and provision. The technology innovations include the unique ability to service multiple customers out of a single system (multi-tenanted). No other service-based solution is so easily scalable, and no other is so fast to deploy – taking literally two or three phone calls and less than half a day to fully deploy across the largest organisation.

Based in Auckland, SMX founders Jesse Ball and Thom Hooker lead a sales and development team focused on local direct sales as well as local and international sales through reseller and licence agreements. A professional Board is headed by chairman John Quirk of IT investment advisors Howard and Company.

Currently SMX has around 45,000 New Zealand business users and a rapidly-growing blue chip customer list including the Automobile Association, the Accident Compensation Corporation, TAB, Sealord and Statistics New Zealand. The growing reseller channel in New Zealand includes Axon, Unisys and Gen-i.

ENDS

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