Outblaze, probably the largest e-mail company you haven't heard of, is now offering its cost advantages to small- and medium-sized providers of e-mail services.

by Alex Goldman ISP-Planet Associate Editor [December 15, 2003]

Founded in 1998, Hong Kong-based Outblaze has grown rapidly in a short time. It is a provider of outsourced services. Its clients include game site IGN, Beer.com, and Mail.com, as well as larger companies such as PCCW-HKT (Hong Kong's ILEC), Citibank, and Dell.

The company now claims 30 million mailboxes processing an average of 200 million messages each day.

Over the years it has expanded its product portfolio to include: address book, anti-spam, anti-virus, auction engine, bookmark, calendar, content manager, direct mailing engine, E-CRM (Electronic Customer Relationship Manager), file cabinet and file sharing system, forum/Message board/BBS, greeting cards, homepage builder, IM (Web-based), interactive whiteboard, mailing lists, match maker, notepad, payment gateway, photo gallery, points system, polling system, SMS, and Webmail in addition to its core product, e-mail.

"Webmail is tougher to do well than regular e-mail," says Stefano Bensi, managing director for Outblaze USA. He says the company's services are available in many languages, and that most implementations use the company's anti-spam and anti-virus services.

Outblaze's anti-spam service is led by Suresh Ramasubramanian, security and anti-spam manager, out of the company's India office. The service is a leader in innovation and has received a great deal of positive publicity, especially in the wake of recent virulent spam attacks. In September of this year, Business Week Online interviewed Ramasubramanian when it wrote about the onslaught.

Bensi says the company's anti-spam work is about solving future problems before they happen in addition to keeping the system running now. "Our team is dedicated to identifying and localizing spam attacks and anticipating future attacks. We also whitelist legitimate organizations."

For anti-virus, the company uses Central Command's Vexira product. "The people at Central Command are experts on Linux-based anti-virus," explains Bensi. "We use mostly open source products. Our systems run on dual Intel machines, and we use a combination of Linux and FreeBSD. We have people who contribute to the kernel on staff to help us build a system that scales to millions of users."

For its larger customers, Outblaze maintains a call center in the Philippines, but the company does most of its support by e-mail. "Phone support is not cost effective for smaller ISPs," says Bensi.

Outblaze is reaching out to ISPs of all sizes in the U.S. because it is breaking into the market now. Based in Asia, the company's sales teams in the U.S. and England are still small. The company expects to compete based on word-of-mouth, service, and price.

"We have very thin margins," says Bensi. "There's no media blitz planned. We're just a small company that has a good product. We like our clients to be so happy that they'll be willing to take calls from potential clients and talk about the service."

The key to the company's Webmail product is ease of use combined with customization. We viewed a sample account at Buffalo.com, a community website for the city of Buffalo, NY. The interface was intuitive and the mail server responded quickly. Separate whitelists, blacklists, address book, and even calendar were all simple, familiar interfaces.

Behind the scenes, however, is a product that can be very flexible. "For example," says Bensi, "the photo album can be private or public or available only to a user's contact list or to specific individuals on their contact list."

Pricing and availability
All Outblaze products are available now, directly from the company. Customers select which elements of the company's portfolio they would like to provide and pay a per-user-per-month fee that varies depending on the products selected and the size of the order.

Outblaze works with small companies, and its minimum order is $1,000 per month.

For an ISP with 10,000 users, Outblaze would charge a $10,000 setup fee plus about $0.30 per user per month. Those interested in Webmail only would pay less than $0.10 per user per month.

An ISP with 10,000 users interested in using Outblaze's anti-spam product but not interested in outsourcing the rest of their mail operations would pay the company's minimum monthly fee, $1,000, plus setup fees of $5,000.

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