The cheque's in the post

Peter Bauer, chief executive of Mimecast, highlights the merits for VARs of selling email management services

The channel may be forgiven for feeling a little shell shocked by the flurry of merger and acquisition activity in the security space that occurred last year. There was a steady stream of announcements, including the acquisition of Surf Control by Websense (who themselves had only just entrapped Black Spider); Postini being snapped up by media giant Google and the acquisition of SecureWave by Patchlink. It’s enough to leave the average channel partner feeling a tad confused as to who they should be dealing with and whether the increasing consolidation of the security vendor landscape represents a threat or an opportunity to them.

Add to this the fact that security products like antivirus products are becoming increasingly commoditised and the move away from software point products to managed services and software as a service (SaaS) and resellers may feel a little baffled and bewildered as to whether there is still good business to be done in the security sector.

Well I don’t profess to have the answer to the meaning of life, or even a crystal ball to foresee who will win the premiership this year, but I am sure that there is still serious money to be made out of the security market place. It’s undoubtedly true that selling packaged software in isolation offers little opportunity for added value; however one area that is still largely untapped is the area of email management. Email I hear you groan, what’s new about that? Well, nothing really other than the fact that it is today the single most important communications medium for businesses and without it many people are unable to work effectively.

Email has become the mainstay of the business world. It’s not only a means of communication with colleagues, customers and partners, but it’s the means by which a huge proportion of business correspondence is delivered to our desks such as contracts, project plans, CVs and unfortunately viruses and malware. In many industries, including the financial and legal market for instance, compliance dictates that we maintain copies of these emails for a considerable amount of time – in some industries as long as 10 years, which is an awful lot of emails.

This brings me to my main point, which is that the management, security and archival of emails is now a major task for the average business. Ensuring all the relevant email files are backed up, filtering out spam and viruses without losing any important emails, being able to retrieve an email that the managing director sent to an important customer but is now unable to find, and ensuring that the email service continues even in the event of an interruption to the service; either planned or enforced; requires a lot of time and attention.

Add to this a fact reported recently by industry analysts the Radicati Group; that just 14 per cent of business emails are being archived, combined with the fact that each of us is receiving an average of 18 MB of data per day - and that’s due to increase to 28 MB of data per day by 2011 - and you’ve got yourself a business opportunity. Combine this with the fact that it can be offered as a web-based service which resellers, as the trusted channel partner, can administer on behalf of their client, and you’ve got yourself a service that your customers need. But most important of all is the ability to offer a service that will keep customers wedded to you and not shopping around for the cheapest price on the block. Selling web-based applications such as email management, unlike selling anti virus boxes, can be sold as part of a managed service or independently as a service that is paid for annually and has those magic ingredients of allowing customers to save money while offering them an all singing, all dancing email management service with bells on.

So before we all assume that there’s no money left in the security market, resellers should follow my advice and look carefully at the opportunities that email management can offer for the astute channel partner and next time they he ar someone say, “the cheque’s in the post,” they'll know what they mean.