Mimecast's Partner Programme gains traction in SA

Mimecast, the holistic e-mail management company offering SaaS-based email archiving, continuity, security and policy control, today announced its reseller partnership with Ricoh South Africa. This channel partnership allows Ricoh SA to expand its document management capability beyond the printed page and electronic archiving into fully-fledged “in the cloud” hosted e-mail management.

Already well known in the office automation space, Ricoh South Africa, formerly known as Gestetner South Africa, began its evolution into an IT-based provider of total document solutions with the introduction of software solutions to manage electronic documents. Now, through its partnership with Mimecast, it will offer Unified Email Management (UEM) to its growing enterprise customer base.

National sales Director at Ricoh SA, Alan Austin, says: “The addition of Mimecast to our suite of software services is another step towards delivering integrated document management solutions. Since Mimecast ensures the document management process, in e-mail format, is more productive and secure than ever before, it shows tangible cost benefits and allows our clients to focus on their core business.”

Today's IT imperatives are to manage complexity, reduce costs and ensure compliance while simultaneously delivering business alignment and support. “To achieve this, IT leaders are looking at more efficient ways to manage business critical functionality. E-mail is central to all organisations. It has become a critical business application and as a result, the ability to continuously store, manage and archive the ever increasing volumes of e-mail is now a significant business issue,” says Garth Wittles, managing director of Mimecast SA.

Ricoh South Africa wants to be sure that we are continually in a position to add real value to our clients by providing them with the products, services and consultancy they need to manage their increasingly electronic document environment,” says Austin.

“The partnership will empower Ricoh's enterprise customers to control unmanageable e-mail storage and mailbox growth and give IT departments peace of mind with sophisticated security controls and end-user continuity and search tools all at a predictable monthly cost,” adds Wittles.

“From a customer perspective, data security is a big issue in South Africa with archiving, in terms of the increasing cost and compliance regulations also becoming a major issue for businesses. And while issues of data leakage and the like are not traditionally our territory, they are so intrinsically linked to effective and secure document management that they can't be separated,” adds Austin. “Now, by leveraging Mimecast's technology platform as part of our total document management solution for customers, we can integrate document security and comprehensive archiving for e-mail into our offering.”

South Africa's confidence in the growing need for e-mail continuity, archiving and security in the market reflects a broader appetite for streamlining IT and selecting more efficient and cost-effective technologies. “IT departments are realising that running all hardware and software in-house is no longer realistic and are turning to their IT partner for guidance and to recommend new better solutions,” says Wittles.