MailGuard founder moves to Manage Protect

In an interview with CRN Johnson said he left MailGuard in April this year.

“I founded the email filtering vendor in 2001 and was there for seven years,” he said.

“During that time I brought in two directors. They are taking the company into another direction. I wish them the best of luck because it’s a good business.”

Johnson described Manage Protect as a security software-as-a-service (SaaS) vendor for the SMB market.

In operation since May this year, the company was founded by George Johnson – who is no relation to Andrew.

“Email filtering is a very mature market, but Web filtering and email archiving is still quite a conservative area,” he said.

“We want to concentrate on signing up resellers that provide services for customers with around 10-300 seats.”

Recently, Manage Protect has signed a sub-distribution deal with email security vendor, MX Logic, said Johnson.

“Manage Protect will focus selling, to resellers, MX Logic anti-spam/antivirus service under its MPmail name,” he said.

“In three months we have seen many resellers move into the manage services area and a lot of those guys use products by Kaseya and ConnectWise, which works with MX’s product.”

Johnson claimed the vendor was 100 percent channel and currently has 12 resellers on board.

“Their customers are horizontal and across the board,” he said.

“They tend to be either a business owner or an IT manager.”

According to Johnson, Manage Protect’s resellers are located in Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane. It also has one reseller in Tasmania, Adelaide and Auckland, New Zealand.