Outblaze, which offers webmail (and much more) as a private-labeled, hosted service, manages 250 million messages a day.

by Jeff Goldman [December 19, 2007]

Outblaze, founded in 1998, now provides e-mail, collaboration, and social media services to 76 million users across 480,000 domains. Of those users, about 40 million are hosted by Outblaze through its private labeled offering, while the others use the company's licensed services, including anti-spam and anti-virus solutions.

Company managing director Stefano Bensi says Outblaze is now the world's largest online platform for such private labeled services—the company manages approximately 250 million messages a day. Outblaze has six data centers worldwide, with 200 employees in offices in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Hong Kong.

Outblaze (203) 286-1424 info@outblaze.com

A key selling point for ISPs, Bensi says, is the flexibility to customize the offering as needed. "ISPs have very specific integration needs—and whether it be integration with the billing system or with existing portal services that the customers sees, we specialize in customizing and tailoring our products to integrate into those services," he says.

And a major benefit of working with a high-volume hosted offering like Outblaze, Bensi says, is the company's broad reach. "We run all of our own spam services, and we have a 24/7 team that manages our global network," he says. "One of the great things about having the kind of volume that we have is that we have real-time eyes looking at global traffic."

Device-agnostic access
Last month, Outblaze announced an enhancement of its webmail offering with the addition of a range of Web 2.0 features including a new AJAX inbox, calendar, address book, and mobile access interface. Key improvements include tabbed messaging (like tabbed browsing) in the inbox, free/busy tracking in the calendar, and support for a wide range of mobile devices.

While Outblaze first implemented AJAX more than a year ago, Bensi says the focus of the recent enhancements is on device-agnostic access. "You can [access] it from a PC, a laptop, a cell phone, a PDA, on a temporary computer—or these days, with increasing frequency, you're accessing it through your gaming station: your Wii or your PS3," he says.

And while the company is focused on e-mail, Bensi says Outblaze continually expands its offering. "We have a pretty robust suite of 18 to 20 services that are available to ISPs to pick and choose what they need," he says. "One of the most important things that we find for the ISP community is that we have a pretty broad range of products that they can enable as they need them, and that allows them to stay competitive."

That suite of services includes private-branded webmail and e-mail, anti-virus, anti-spam, calendar, file sharing, personal and group address books, webhosting, a social networking platform, online video editing and sharing, photo sharing, blogging, wiki, chat, forums, message boards, an avatar engine, mail archiving, disaster recovery, gaming, and more.

Software as a Service
Pricing for the company's services is structured per user per month, with a minimum monthly total of $1,000. While larger clients can take advantage of volume discounts, Bensi says Outblaze works with clients of all sizes. "It's priced very flexibly, and is very accessible for everyone from the smaller ISPs right up to the larger ones," he says.

And Bensi says the software-as-a-service model in general has a lot to offer to ISPs. "A lot of ISPs today have a licensed solution—and one of the challenges with a licensed solution is staying competitive," he says. "The tendency is to buy a particular version, get it installed, and let it run. Then you sit back, and either because you're not budgeting for the upgrades or because they're hard to schedule in terms of resources and competing priorities, the product tends to get stale and out of date."

As a result, he says, most ISPs that choose to deploy a licensed solution will eventually end up with a non-competitive product. "Then you start to have some attrition of the use of that service—and e-mail being still a killer app, the loss of your customers using your system for e-mail has an impact on loyalty," Bensi says.

In comparison, Bensi says, software as a service simply makes sense. "The hosted option has matured over the last few years and is a very viable option—and one of the benefits is that you have always up-to-date and competitive technology and services," he says. "And that's what we focus our entire team on ensuring."

— End

Related articles:
	[Nov. 17, 2005]	Economies of Scale in E-Mail Security
	[April 21, 2004]	A Frequently E-Mailed Question
	[Dec. 15, 2003]	Big Mail Company Now Ready to Serve You

Online resource:
	Webmail Directory
	Webmail Quick Reference Chart