Quality Smith

Moving to SpamTitan from a hardware appliance has made managing the IT security needs of 80+ employees straightforward and undemanding.

QualitySmith specializes in matching qualified customers looking for a wide variety of home improvement services with professional service providers. There are many divisons to the company inlcuding a Home division and an Auto division.

There headquarters are located in Walla Walla, a small town in Eastern Washington. Washington CEO Magazine recently named QualitySmith one of "Washington's Best 100 Companies to Work For."

With the sourcing of skilled contractors a significant part of their work a large number of employees spend their workdays visiting websites and reading email. Because the company is growing rapidly, Quality Smith needs to manage that protection environment simply and easily. In 2008, the firm the company moved to SpamTitan ISO. The results include security-related time savings of up to 10 hours per week, a 55% percent reduction in licensing costs, and an unstressed and productive IT department.

The Challenge situation

Initially Quality Smith relied on a  Barracuda hardware appliance (Spam Firewall 200) to protect their email. They found this solution did not provide them with the low maintenance overhead and high levels of functionality that they required. At this point they began to evaluate other solutions.  We downloaded a free 30 day SpamTitan  trial and were very pleased that it was so easy to use and effective. “I liked very much the idea of  being able to ‘trial before you buy’. The ability to evaluate the full version and see what it could do certainly gave us the confidence to go with SpamTitan,” he added. With SpamTitan I was able to use my own hardware! This lets me decide when I need to upgrade the hardware, and on my terms!’ said  Kevin Bidwell, Information Systems Manager.

Before trialling SpamTitan, Quality Smith were getting about 300k spam messages a day. The average end-user was receiving about 10 pieces a day. Following the installation of SpamTitan the daily spam levels dropped to less than 20k a day representing  a decrease of over   93%. Due to the many frontline features incorporated in SpamTitan, 90% of the spam emails were blocked before even getting to the SpamTitan appliance. Consequently one of the biggest differences with their previous solution was the time that was saved in dealing with peoples complaints and IT issues related to spam. According to Kevin ‘ I never hear end-users complain about spam anymore. From a personal standpoint, I have not received a single piece of spam while under the protection of SpamTitan!’

Benefits

What tipped the scales? According to Kevin ‘apart from freedom from spam an important factor for Quality Smith and all small businesses is the cost factor. The purchase and first year license of SpamTitan cost far less than our yearly renewal alone with our previous provider . ‘ I don't know if I can quantify the time savings that the 80+ people at our company have enjoyed, but 40 of those people are sales reps, and every minute they are not dealing with spam, is another to make money’  says Kevin.

Quality Smith found the features of SpamTitan to be extensive. ‘We find the personal spam settings and personal quarantine reports a very useful feature. Letting my users determine their level of protection and add their own white-lists and blacklists saves them and me time ‘says Kevin. From a reporting point of view Kevin commented that with their previous solution reporting module was very slow  in comparison to SpamTitan. ‘If there was a large amount of spam coming in, the reports wouldn't even work, and I'd just have to re-route my mail directly to our mail server. Kevin reported that ‘SpamTitan has never once become unresponsive’.

The Quality Smith experience of SpamTitan technical support was very positive also although the company never experienced a serious problem with the solution. Kevin reports that ‘thankfully I never had any serious issues, but the one time I had a configuration question, I got my answer in one day.’

For Quality Smith the best features of SpamTitan were being able to use their own hardware, the comprehensive personal spam setting and quarantine report and the fact that SpamTitan provided them with a low maintenance automated solution that had never let them down.

Months after the deployment of SpamTitan Kevin and his I.T. team are still pleased with their choice.  Previously Spam caused his department a lot of stress. Oftentimes they would get numerous complaints from high ranking employees whose inboxes were continually getting clogged up with Spam. The IT department have saved themselves time, hassle and money by implementing SpamTitan. According to Kevin Bidwell ‘ Since installing SpamTitan, I no longer worry about whether my spam solution is working or not, it just does!’

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