South African intellectual capital, already in strong demand, has been further acknowledged abroad with the integration by New Zealand-based IT solutions company Marshal Software of a locally developed user interface into its MailMarshal SMTP gateway e-mail content and security tool.
MailMarshal SMTP is one of the world`s leading Web content monitoring tools, keeping a constant vigil for malicious code or prohibited content in e-mail messages, attachments and embedded content.
"Local ISP NetActive, recently bought by Tiscali World Online, developed its own Web-based graphical user interface (GUI) for MailMarshal. When Marshal Software saw the Web-based GUI in action, it wanted a similar interface and chose to fast-track the development process by asking us to integrate it directly into the core application," says Graeme Slogrove, new product research executive at Tiscali World Online.
"We initially developed the interface as we found the maintenance of the application from an ISP perspective to be awkward," says Slogrove. "Other global ISPs had the same problems we experienced, and Marshal Software saw clear potential to deploy the interface at other ISPs."
Slogrove was contracted for three months to complete the integration of the new GUI into MailMarshal on-site in New Zealand. The companies have subsequently struck an agreement in terms of which Tiscali World Online enjoys preferential rates when buying MailMarshal software, sales of which should soar, as an unexpected spin-off of the Web-based GUI has been the ability to deploy MailMarshal SMTP according to the application service provider (ASP) model.
The Web front-end allows users to access the application from a centralised server across the Internet and take advantage of economies of scale and centralised management.
"The Web GUI has allowed us to bring a new pricing model and distribution structure to customers," says Slogrove. "Customers can now pay for the product monthly on a per-user basis and the structure of individual deals can be changed from one month to the next."
Products such as MailMarshal are expected to see increasing deployment in the market.
Research firm IDC expects that the market for security and content management will grow to $4.3 billion by 2005. Anti-virus will form the bulk of this growth, while e-mail scanning will consist of $620 million at a compound annual growth rate of 47%, according to the research organisation.
That is one of the primary reasons why Marshal Software has contracted Tiscali World Online to integrate the GUI with its software.
"Integrating a Web front-end into a content security application like MailMarshal that covers confidentiality protection, management reporting, attachment control, legal liability protection, bandwidth protection and optimisation, anti-spam, content analysis and anti-virus, and then making it available in terms of the ASP model is quickly becoming a killer app for the Web that companies cannot afford to ignore," says Slogrove.
Businesses can avert confidential information and intellectual property losses, shield themselves against defamation and embarrassment, stop the spread of inappropriate material in the workplace, restore employee productivity, eliminate excessive non-business bandwidth consumption to enhance network performance and curtail the distribution of unauthorised or pirated software.
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