MessageLabs to offer managed email archiving

MessageLabs has launched its foray into the services market with a new managed email archiving offering.

The service offers a service level agreement which offers 100 percent virus free email, a 95 percent guarantee of stopping all spam, and a one in 250,000 guarantee of blocking legitimate emails.

The service also offers a real-time search SLA of less than three minutes to find a searched for item no matter how large the searched database.

MessageLabs boss James Scollay, claimed the new service could offer businesses a reduced email management TCO of 20 to 30 percent.

“Customers also have the benefit of off site email archiving and disaster recovery,” he said. “Compliance is important for driving email archiving but the key thing is ease of use, search and retrieval."

Scolley said the ACMA’s recent mandate that all ISPs were to have spam filtering by July 16 would be a boon for the new offering, Scollay said.

“A lot of ISPs already have spam filtering but it’s a question of how good that filtering is,” he said.

“ISPs could easily offer a basic filter and a premium product with archiving for around $5 a month. Small businesses would be happy to pay that for no spam.”

The new offering was significant for MessageLabs in that it was the first step down an aggressive new product roadmap, Scollay said.

The company plans to shortly offer a complementary range of web protection services – antispyware and antivirus and URL filtering – then look at offering managed instant messaging, mobile messaging and VoIP services.

Locally, MessageLabs has partnered with IBM, CSC, Unisys, Hostworks, Dimension Data and Alphawest to offer the service and would look to mid-range and smaller ISPs and tier two SIs to take its offering to market, Scollay said.

The new service offers dealers a sliding scale of commission based on their status within MessageLabs’ partner program.