Johannesburg, 24 Jun 2009
Outsourced information and records management company Metrofile, and Mimecast SA, have announced a strategic partnership, which sees Metrofile adding email archiving and security to its arsenal of records management services.
Earlier this year, Mimecast announced the expansion of its partner programme to include alliance, technology and system integrator partnerships. These partners can integrate Mimecast's offering into their technology or services. The reason for the move beyond a pure reseller channel model was to capitalise on the exploding interest in software as a service (SaaS) offerings by broadening the go-to-market reach of the company.
The technology partnership with Metrofile is the first of a number of channel announcements Mimecast expects to make this year. Garth Wittles, managing director of Mimecast SA says: “Metrofile's 8 000 customers will now have access to a unified e-mail management product that is a perfect match as Mimecast UEM provides all the archiving, security, continuity, control and peace of mind they have come to associate with Metrofile, just with their e-mail as well as their paper.”
The partnership with Mimecast will allow Metrofile to extend its core business offerings into the e-mail management arena, a service that it has received much interest from clients over the past year. The agreement will be Metrofile's first foray into products and services that address its customers' e-mail data needs.
Peter McLaren-Kennedy, sales and marketing director of Metrofile, says: “Currently we provide customers with a range of services designed to ensure information and records are securely and properly managed. The inclusion of Mimecast into our product range effectively allows us to expand these services into a fully-fledged data protection service, one that will ensure business continuity in the event of a disaster. Earlier this year we worked with Tracker to get their business back up and running, in just four hours, after a fire devastated their head office. If Tracker had been working on Mimecast UEM, it could have taken even less time to restore core business activity. Business continuity through e-mail is powerful.”
After researching a number of products, Metrofile settled on Mimecast as its e-mail management partner because of its technology advantages, the company's professionalism and reputation for responsiveness, its wealth of reference sites as well as the length of time Mimecast has been in the market.
“We cannot afford to partner badly,” says McLaren-Kennedy. “When we looked at all the options, Mimecast was the one product that can be used in any business, of any size, using any technology.”
“With businesses needing to protect themselves against Eskom outages, natural disasters and less natural problems such as the ever-present threat of hardware failures, it makes sense to put in all the backup plans needed to protect your information assets. As a result of our partnership with Mimecast, we can now offer clients backup plans for all forms of data, online and offline,” concludes McLaren-Kennedy.
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