Messaging

How E-Mail Helps SMBs Compete

One service provider says its offering, available for resale to ISPs, enables small business to compete with big business.

by Alex Goldman ISP-Planet Managing Editor [December 16, 2004]

Hong Kong-based e-mail service provider Outblaze is offering an e-mail service targeted at SMB customer for resale by ISPs. The company is one of the largest e-mail providers in the world, with 35 million mailboxes under management.

Stef Bensi, U.S. managing director of Outblaze, says the need for the service is clear. "ISPs have a general desire to gain additional revenue streams. ISPs often have an established customer base of end users and SMBs, but offering advanced e-mail services is often outside the ISP skill set."

Bensi enthuses that these services are vital to SMBs because they enable small business to compete. "Traditionally, SMBs were not able to compete with large corporations, but now SMBs can leverage the benefits of working with a company like Outblaze."

With an outsourced solution, SMBs can have the benefits of an IT team without employing the team in house. "An in house solution is expensive to build, maintain, and upgrade," notes Bensi. "Is the SMB adequately managing spam and virus threats? We provide hourly updates of virus definitions and a powerful anti-spam program."

Key to integrating ISPs into its sales channel is Outblaze's administrative control panel. The control panel, Bensi says, allows ISP to assign domains, enable calendar and contact sharing within the domain, and to delegate the allocation of storage space to the mailboxes within the domain.

To change features, the ISP administrator or SME administrator would log into either an Outblaze domain or a custom domain like sme.[ISP domain].com. Mail would be obtained from mail.[customer domain].com or mail.[ISP domain].com.

All of the software powering these services was developed in house by Outblaze. The company also runs its own anti-virus and anti-spam system. The anti-spam team is led by Suresh Ramasubramanian, Outblaze security and anti-spam manager, out of the company's India office. As an anti-spammer he has received accolades too numerous to mention here, but it should be noted that he is a founding member of both CAUCE India and APCAUCE.

Pricing and availability
The service is available now for resale.

Pricing starts at about $4 per 100 MB of storage space with a monthly minimum of $1,000. Volume discounts significantly lower the fee.

The monthly minimum can be waived for startups with significant growth opportunities, but only for a few months. During the launch of the service, Outblaze is being more flexible than it will be in the future.

Customized implementations are available for larger ISPs, priced as a one time fee according to Outblaze's costs.

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