SMX secures landmark sale to India

Local cloud-based antispam and antivirus company SMX has more than doubled its user numbers with a single sale to the Times Group of India.

Company managing director Jesse Ball says the service is now live throughout the Times Group, which is reported to have an annual revenue of $US700 million. The Times Group includes five daily newspapers, 31 magazines, 32 radio stations, two television news channels and one television life style channel. Its flagship daily, The Times of India, has the largest circulation of any English-language newspaper in the world.

SMX will support the security solution remotely from its service centre in Auckland, with local support from its Indian market partner, CMC.

“This is certainly a lighthouse sale for SMX,” Ball says “We won the deal against leading antispam and antivirus solutions, including the incumbent, Cisco.

“Most important, the deal illustrates a sales and implementation model for SMX that is fundamental to our global growth plans. Our solution is running inside Times Group’s network on their infrastructure, under their brand and under their management. Our solution was implemented in 2.5 days and includes full provisioning and billing capabilities. As such, Times Group can not only use the solution internally, but also package the service to sell externally.”

Ball says the Times Group contract is the first major fruit of a market partnership agreement with CMC, a subsidiary of India’s largest IT services company, TCS (Tata Consultancy Services), and part of the Tata Group. CMC is based in India with a presence in the US, UK and the Middle East.

SMX was founded in 2006 by Ball and Thom Hooker and has offices in Auckland. It has customers in NZ, Japan and Australia.

“New Zealand has proven the technology on a small scale,” he says. “The next step up was the likes of the CMC deal. The Times sale shows our scalability with more than one million users.”

CMC managing director Ramanathan Ramanan says the company has the SMX solution up and running at two CMC datacentres, and is offering the service to customers as a fully hosted solution as well as supporting implementations such as what the Times Group has chosen.

With this offering customers can choose to run the SMX service on their own infrastructure, with the potential to rebrand the service as part of broader cloud services, both within their own organisation and to external customers.

SMX’s email security service deals with multiple distributors, resellers and customers from a single system (multi-tenanted). The company leverages a global network of market partners, to be able to locally deploy infrastructure. This ensures email is not routed offshore; instead it is filtered in the customer’s own country under local law and under the jurisdiction of the datacentre.

The SMX email security platform integrates other email security engines, providing a comprehensive, real-time intelligence network.

As well as CMC, international reseller partners include Symantec and Fujitsu.

Ball would not disclose the value of the Times Group deal.