AdvanceNet has been appointed as a Mimecast solution provider for sub-Saharan Africa. This significant partner announcement brings one of the local pioneers in software as a service (SaaS) on board to take Mimecast's Unified Email Management offering to a broader market in south, east and central Africa.
AdvanceNet has grown over 20 years of hard work into a respected and trusted technology solutions provider, with particular skills in customer relationship management systems and business analytics, as well as the hardware and software that underpin them. It operates in 30 countries, particularly in mining, financial services, telecommunications, logistics and government.
“The concept of cloud computing is not new, but its time has so clearly come in the African market. We have spent decades perfecting our business model to allow us to offer SaaS solutions to customers in a dependable, sustainable way. The race is now on across the IT services industry to have the most complete suite of offerings that meets the most pressing needs of enterprises,” says Phil Hemsley, managing director of AdvanceNet.
“Mimecast's extensive carrier-class infrastructure and its archival and retrieval technology place it years ahead of most competitive offerings. We can take Mimecast into a client, knowing that they are getting value for money, and absolute peace of mind. It is the premier product in its class, bringing businesses rock-solid reliability and flawless management of e-mail,” says Hemsley.
AdvanceNet will act as an implementation and support partner, and has done advanced training for its senior engineering staff to ensure that they can deliver high levels of technical capability.
“Many businesses know they need to sort out their archival and e-discovery capability, but there are even more that don't yet know they need it. This used to be classified as 'important', but it's becoming 'critical'. It's only a matter of time before a board of directors is faced with a legal complication, and hear the words that will give them no end of trouble: 'Prove to me that an e-mail was not tampered with.' Having backups is not enough in modern business: you also have to be able to retrieve them quickly, and show complete chain of custody that there has been no tampering,” says Hemsley.
Selecting a technology partner to provide a SaaS solution requires looking at price, technical capability and business maturity. AdvanceNet has been in the cloud computing game for more than a decade with its own hosted technologies for mobility and financial management, as well as top-tier offerings from Salesforce.com.
Analyst group, Gartner, predicts that by 2012, more than 40% of software solutions will be delivered by the cloud worldwide. The recent massive acceleration of fibre network rollouts around Africa will allow the continent to stay with this wave.
“We have no question that AdvanceNet is the right company to take Mimecast solutions to the market,” says Grant Hodgkinson, business development and alliances director at Mimecast South Africa. “Phil and his team understand the business and technical drivers that can make a SaaS solution a perfect fit for an enterprise over the long-term, and have the track record to give them confidence in taking the leap from buying their own hardware infrastructure to trusting in the cloud.”
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Mimecast
Mimecast delivers SaaS-based enterprise e-mail management, including archiving, discovery, continuity, security and policy. By unifying disparate and fragmented e-mail environments into one holistic solution that is always available from the cloud, Mimecast minimises risk, reduces cost and complexity. Founded in 2003, Mimecast has expanded from the United Kingdom into the United States, South Africa, Scandinavia and Dubai. The e-mail management company serves more than 2 000 customers worldwide. For more information, go to http://www.mimecast.com.
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