SMX more than doubles user numbers with single sale

Cloud-based anti-spam and anti-virus company SMX has signed its largest international deal to date with a sale to the Times Group – India’s largest media conglomerate.

SMX Managing Director Jesse Ball says the SMX anti-spam and anti-virus email security service is now live throughout the Times Group, providing inbound and outbound email security across Times Group companies including public email services provided by various Times Group subsidiaries.

The Times Group is highly diversified and includes five daily newspapers; 31 magazines; 32 radio stations; two television news channels and one television lifestyle channel.

“This is certainly a lighthouse sale for SMX,” Jesse Ball says. “We won the deal against leading anti-spam and anti-virus solutions, including the incumbent CISCO.

“Most important, the deal illustrates a sales and implementation model for SMX which is fundamental to our global growth plans. Our solution is running inside Times Group’s network, on their infrastructure, under their brand, and under their management. Our solution was implemented in 2.5 days and includes full provisioning and billing capabilities; so Times Group can not only use the solution internally but also package the service to sell externally. SMX will support the solution remotely from our service centre in Auckland, with local support from our Indian market partner CMC.”

Ball says that the Times Group contract is the first major fruit of a market partnership agreement with CMC Limited, a subsidiary of India’s largest IT services company, TCS Ltd (Tata Consultancy Services Limited), and part of the Tata Group. CMC is based in India with a presence in USA, UK and the Middle East.

CMC Managing Director Mr Ramanathan Ramanan says CMC has the SMX solution up and running at two CMC datacentres, and is offering the service to customers as a fully hosted solution as well as supporting implementations such as Times Group where a customer prefers to run the SMX service on their own infrastructure, with the potential to rebrand the service as part of broader cloud services both within their own organisation as well as to external customers.

“We’re delighted that Times Group has selected SMX following a highly competitive open tender process,” Mr Ramanan says. “Many larger organisations want the benefits of a cloud-based email security solution, but at the same time want the security of being able to manage the service themselves, inside their own network Some customers will prefer to have CMC host email services as a fully outsourced solution; others will prefer to retain control themselves. The strength of the SMX solution is that customers can choose whichever best suits their business. No other cloud-based email security product can offer such flexibility with such scalability and speed of implementation,” Mr Ramanan says.

Archana Vohra, Vice President of Times Internet Limited, says: “We are proud to be associated with SMX. We were able to deploy the service for consumer email within days, prior to the contract being signed, allowing Times Group to trial the service before buying it.”

ENDS

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