Security

ASP Seeks Best-of-Breed Resellers

Commtouch, an expert in e-mail backup services and in Microsoft Exchange hosting, is looking for a few resellers for its products. This small, focused enterprise should be a more attentive ally than its larger competitors.

by Alex Goldman ISP-Planet Associate Editor [Noivember 9, 2001]

Commtouch is looking for best-of-breed channel partners to resell its managed services, either on a subscription or revenue-share basis. The company is a prodvider of managed services, and has several products for service providers. They fall into two broad categories: emergency
e-mail services, and Microsoft Exchange hosting.

Crisis e-mail
Service providers interested in selling secure e-mail in light of recent events may be more interested in Commtouch's other product. Called "the Commtouch eMail Continuity Plan" (or ECP for short), the service provides backup e-mail for companies that experience an unforeseen disaster.

The product comes in three levels:

At the simplest level, the program prevents the loss of inbound e-mail by switching to Commtouch servers if the client company's servers go down.

At the next level, Commtouch sets up a full backup e-mail system with the client company's user directories and passwords so that e-mail service stays up. "Clients can throw the switch manually or the backup system can engage without user intervention," says Harding.

At the top level, Commtouch maintains a real-time backup copy of every inbox in the client company. "Although some companies are concerned about liability issues surrounding having two copies of each e-mail, there are companies that employ many knowledge workers that require zero downtime and want this service," claims Harding.

The ECP service is priced at between $1 per seat per month and $3 per seat per month, depending on services required and volume ordered. "We're trying to make this services too cheap to say no to," says Harding. "The challenge is to provide more than a customer could do for less than it would cost them to do it, and we achieve this through economies of scale."

Microsoft Exchange
The Commtouch Exchange 2000 Hosting service is run out of Commtouch's Network Operations Center (NOC) in Mountain View, Calif. The product gives customers e-mail, group calendars, task lists, file sharing, and a database for contacts. The program combines Commtouch hosted messaging with Microsoft Exchange 2000.

"We're proud to be a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner," said Michael Harding, Commtouch Senior Director of Marketing. "Other gold partners are massive enterprises like Cable & Wireless. Very few companies achieve gold certification. It shows we're experts in this area."

Harding says that the product is especially popular with distributed enterprises. "When we launched our own service," he says, "we had Web and POP e-mail and we had WAP and SMS too. Now we have about 20 million total users, including ISPs and portals."

The Commtouch Exchange 2000 Hosting service is priced at $25 per seat per month, but volume discounts are available. "We want to give providers a price point at which they can do a markup of 50 or 100 percent," says Harding.

Seeking channels
Commtouch has been building its channel relationships in order to deal with the bad news announced on October 30th, when the company reported results and laid off about 40 employees as its research center in Tel Aviv.

At that time, Gideon Mantel, CEO of Commtouch noted, "Based on our current cash balance of $5.4 million and revised projections of revenues and related expenses, the Company should have sufficient cash to continue operations."

Mantel added that Commtouch's results would be impacted by whether or not companies continued to spend. "The uncertain economic environment and recent tragic events have brought much of business decision-making to a standstill," he warned.

Harding says that companies may not be spending much, but, "even if they're not spending money on anything else, companies are spending on backup and security services. When we decide to collaborate with a company, they're not one out of hundreds of VARs. We spend thirty days to get them up and running—and we get their existing customers up while we're doing this."

"We train sales people and their helpdesk, and we bring resources to the collaboration. We have our own infrastructure, and we provide a tier 2 help desk as part of the deal, so that if a client escalates a trouble call, we'll step in and help," Harding continues.

A small company promises to be a better partner than a larger one, but some short-term financial worries remain.

— End