Reseller Channel Delivers Explosive Growth For Email Managed Services Sector
Email management specialist Email Systems has reported a 300% increase in the number of resellers that have signed up to offer its services in the UK over the last six months, primarily due to a major surge of demand for email managed services in both the corporate and public sector markets.
As a result in this boom in demand, the company has unveiled an improved dedicated partner programme, designed to ensure that reseller partners are fully supported. This will comprise a series of training initiatives, allowing partners to better serve their existing clients and additional marketing and sales support to help win new business.
Specifically, the programme will include regular interactive training sessions via web conferencing, access to a new Partner Portal – which offers customer account provisioning, on-line pricing and lead management – and a monthly industry newsletter, comprising industry information, product updates and the latest statistics.
Neil Hammerton, CEO of Email Systems commented:
“As we move into the next stage of Email Systems’ development we wanted to take this opportunity to ensure that that our reseller partners are able to benefit from the increasing number of opportunities that are being created in the market.”
In addition to the IT sector, Email Systems has historically been particularly strong in education, working closely with the like of London Grid for Learning and Equinox Converged Solutions, more than 1.1 million students in the UK current benefit from the protection email systems offers. A large proportion of the recent increase in interest has been focussed on this sector, with a massive growth of specialist educational reseller partners.
Research has revealed that education is a sector that has been particularly badly hit by spam and it’s associated problems – as more than sixty percent of all mails to the UK student community were spam and/or virus related during the second half of 2004 (*). Moreover, the education sector is being increasingly subjected to Denial of Service (DoS) attacks which typically single out individual domain addresses to bombard them with spam and/or virus ridden email at up to 10,000% the usual rate, with the effect of a reduction or complete failure in internet and email access.
Outside the education sector, which is typically serviced by specialist resellers, the majority of Email Systems’ other channel partners offer the services to a broad range of sectors, including Financial Services, Health (including Medical and Pharmaceutical), Manufacturing, Engineering & Industrial, Motoring, Telecommunications and Support services – such as Legal Practices and Human Resources.
Other resellers are focussing on geographical areas – for example Email Systems has signed a deal with Sx3, a major force in the Northern Irish market to offer the suite of management services to organisations in that area. With new clients in all of the above areas, the channel is playing a highly significant part in Email Systems’ recent organic growth.
A key element in the increase in demand for managed services is the ongoing increase in the proportion of email that is either spam or a virus. In February 2005 for example, an average of 92.08% of all incoming email was identified as spam and, at its lowest point, legitimate email constituted just 2% of all emails being sent and received.
Neil Hammerton, CEO of Email Systems, added:
“The channel market has simply exploded for us in recent months, with an incredible surge in interest delivering both new partners and clients across the UK and further afield. With spam and other email threats currently at an all time high and organisations concluding that a managed service is a significantly more effective approach than that of user-based software, the growth looks set to continue apace.”
Email Systems manages and monitors the flow of spam and virus infected email messages on behalf of millions of corporate, public sector and domestic users across the UK. For more information, visit www.EmailSystems.com or call 0870 141 7070.
(*) Email Systems internal research, January 2005 – Based on monitoring tens of millions of emails for students and educational professionals each month.
About Email Systems:
Email Systems offers a comprehensive range of best-of-breed email management and protection services that are available either individually or as a modular package for Enterprise, Home and ISP customers. These include archiving, image scanning and encryption, in addition to core anti-spam and anti-virus services. Email Systems’ web-based solutions ensure that clients need not download or manage software on their PC or server, offering complete peace of mind with no effort required. Email Systems is continually developing technical partnerships with global market leaders, such as Commtouch, which offers unique Recurrent Pattern Detection (RPD) technology to analyse large volumes of Internet traffic in real time, protecting customers from the first seconds of a spam or virus outbreak. Email Systems has offices in the United Kingdom, France and Sweden.