Last week I got the pleasure of finally unloading the business pitch about ExchangeDefender 5 and all the features we’ve built for this new business model.

If you missed the webcast, you can download it here.

If you have any questions about what we’re up to or how it stacks up with what you’re currently using – please take the compete challenge.

Make no mistake, there is no comparison to the feature set, price or organization that stands behind the solution. Simply, none. Take a look at the PDF and find another SAS 70 Type II audited company that will deliver all that for 75 cents / mailbox and you’ll be right back here. We worked very hard to build this offering and make our partners winners in 2010. We’ve made serious investments and addressed some of the “you’ll never see that happen” concerns and comments we’ve gotten over the years.

So let’s talk about some less-than-glamorous changes in ExchangeDefender 5:

SMTP tempfail

Our new SMTP implementation has reduced the inbound mail flow by 91%. It went live with ExchangeDefender 5 backend which is the reason why you have so little SPAM to deal with or review all of a sudden.

“I have to admit that I never looked at the old reports because they had nothing but junk. I love the new short list and it still hasn’t caught a single piece of real mail. Nice combination!”

What does this mean for you? Well, less SPAM to review. Less likelyhood that the user will blindly whitelist a forged address and let a ton of SPAM in. Less storage on the server. More attentive users. Less SPAM or accidental whitelist slippage. Overall, less nightmares.

Want more? ExchangeDefender will give you an option (for free) to queue up to 1 month of SPAM on our servers. This way, if you take a 3 week vacation, you can still access the SPAM that got trapped while you’re out. Nobody else does this.

Support Tiering

Once upon a time, I answered the phone. Every time.

That’s because I was the only one working at Own Web Now Corp.

Grow by leaps and bounds and you get a logistical nightmare of providing expert support, knowledge and customer service around the clock. At the end of the day, we are paid for our performance and reliability (SLA) – not for the customer service and brownie points. The new support escalation process has been fantastic, we got a ton of great comments and we’re still working out all the details as well.

But don’t take my word for it, here is the impression our partners get:

“I called in to Travis today to ask about the intended cutover process (was it worth me getting something rolling now before the upgrade or should I wait?)  I have to tell you that might have been the (good) Customer Service example of the month (although his competition at Intuit yesterday left him plenty of room).  He answered all the questions directly and more importantly I was impressed with what he did with the ones he COULDN’T answer.  He excused himself momentarily as he wrote them down on the whiteboard to insure he asked (whomever) before he got back to me.  He confirmed my email address and phone number and then proceeded to tell me what he was going to do and by when.  (And he did all of that in an accent I could understand!)

If you have an employee of the <timeframe> – I nominate Travis.  Not for going above and beyond.  Not for being outstanding.  Just for doing his job well and leaving this individual with a perception of having been well taken care of.  He didn’t fix all my sh*t but he did his job so well, I didn’t care.  That’s all we ask for with customer f*ckig service.” 

We don’t consider our support a cost center – we consider it to be a key feature in our service. Our new escalation let’s everyone document the case, the smartest and right person to solve the problem and the nicest and most market aware person to call you back when you have a true problem.

The Backend

ExchangeDefender 5 has been live on the backend and running flawlessly for a while now. In addition to reducing the load, reducing the SPAM counts and making the overall system more effective we have noticed the following changes:

1. Lowest whitelist / blacklist activity of the year (fewer false whitelists of forged addresses)
2. Faster login and message search due to database compression
3. Faster message delivery due to the elimination of deliver/deliver across different SPAM confidence levels that got misused.
4. No complaints about delays.
5. No complaints about the whitelists with the new MagicKey infrastructure.

We have made the system more efficient, less burdensome and managing SPAM has become an afterthought. Now we turn to making profits with everything else ExchangeDefender brings you free of charge.

Next Steps

Our new User, Domain Administrator and Service Provider UI launches this week (on December 8th) and if you’re technical you need to be there. I will be holding three live webinars and launching ExchangeDefender 5 in the final one, at 10 PM. Here are the webinars, the first two have just a few seats left:

Tuesday, December 8th, 7 AM – 8 AM EST

Tuesday, December 8th, 3 PM – 4 PM EST

Tuesday, December 8th, 10 PM – 11 PM EST

So to review:

If you missed the first webcast, download it from here and find out the business proposition. If you are currently not on ExchangeDefender, you seriously need to figure out what you’re missing. Finally, register for the 3 webcasts due next week to showcase the new UI launch. So far, things are going great!

Sincerely,

Vlad Mazek, MCSE

CEO, Own Web Now Corp

P.S. One of my competitors in this space that I have a pretty good relationship with told me today that I’m killing him and when the torture will be over. Which brings me to the funny conversation I had in the parking lot earlier tonight as we were leaving the office and I tried to fill in a few holes in the details. My coworkers response: “Wow. We are going to be doing all that?” – yep, folks, it’s on.