Messaging

Hosted E-Mail Archiving Company Seeks SP Partners

The eponymous Stephen Marsh says that his company, Smarsh, is prepared for anything after winning over the financial and health care sectors.

by Alex Goldman ISP-Planet Managing Editor [May 13, 2008]

Portland, Ore.-based Smarsh began life as a consulting firm, explains founder, president, and CEO Stephen Marsh. "We were an IT development firm catering to financial customers. We have spend seven or eight years developing a high capacity mission critical platform. Back in 2001, 2002, it was tough for small firms to meet compliance standards because they were not able to spend over $100,000. We put together a platorm then. The puzzle was how to make it scalable."

The answer was in house development. "Now, it's 100 percent our own technology. The products have evolved to the point where they're probably on their 50th or 60th revision."

The channel, now
Smarsh has over 3,000 customers, but most are financial services firms. To obtain customers in a wider community, Smarsh is looking to service provider and VAR partners. "Our top priority for 2008 into 2009," says Marsh, "is to accelerate growth through channel partners."

The company has always had resellers, but never had a leadership team devoted to the channel. It has brought in Dave Kasprzak to head the reseller and alliance program. The company will be out in force at ISPCON touting the product.

Smarsh's product is aimed at businesses of all sizes. It has three tiers of management (Smarsh, Reseller, and Corporate). The final tier, Mash says, is virtually infinite, allowing the business customer to replicate their hierarchy in the access permissions, whether the company is a dispersed business with 50 branch offices or a complex hierarchy in a single building.

Smarsh already has a few resellers in the service provider space, many of whom are hosted e-mail or security service providers.

Smarsh does provide e-mail hosting and spam filtering for some customers, but is looking to focus on archiving and compliance.

Questions
Marsh asks us what questions ISPs have about a hosted service like his. Several are obvious.

Are you a partner that an ISP can trust? "I should point out that, in getting our start in financial services, we've been scrutinized heavily in the areas of reliability and redundancy. We have erred on the side of execessive redundancy and excessive security, mainly because of the types of customer we're dealing with and the data we're protecting: credit card numbers, social security numbers, health care data."

In addition, Marsh says, his company's customer service reflects the high expectations of his customers. "We have an over 99 percent customer retention rate. We go above and beyond the call of duty. No service is outsourced. We provide 24 x 7 support."

As to the business' viability, "we've been profitable and growing from our first day in business."

The company has sales and support offices in three locations: Portland, San Francisco, and New York.

In conlusion, "overall, we're the experienced vendor. We offer reliability, trust, and a full set of features. We have credibility with a demanding customer base. We can help ISPs and our other partners gain market share."

Pricing and availability
Marsh did not provide pricing guidance because pricing can vary depend on the features the ISP wants and needs. "Do they want to offer IM and archiving? Do they want to charge a flat fee for unlimited storage? Do they want to do their own billing or do they want us to do the billing. We try to make it attractive for our customers."

— End