Sydney firm wins managed security distribution

Sydney-based service provider Dazz IT -- trading as My IT Helpdesk -- has signed up as master Australasian distributor of VirtualConnect's managed email security service Mail Protector.

Daryl Hunt, director at My IT Helpdesk, said Mail Protector offered equivalent functionality at a cheaper price than many other managed email security services.

The lower price point meant it should sell better to cash-strapped smaller companies, he said.

No other Australian distributor as yet had access to the product, which had been supplied by developer VirtualConnect to US companies since the late 1990s, he said.

"We've been trialling and testing the product for the last four to five months and had it up and running to a limited number of customers," Hunt said.

"The main advantage is that [the Mail Protector service] has been up 100 percent of the time in the last 12 months. It has high availability."

Hunt said My IT Helpdesk sought 30 to 40 resellers across Australia and New Zealand to sell Mail Protector. The distributor believed resellers could earn 20 percent margins on average.

Also, resellers could earn recurring revenue because they would get paid a commission monthly, not just at the time of initial purchase, he said.

Mail Protector was easy to install and manage so resellers would not have to have specialised knowledge to offer the service, he said.

"It's simply a plug-and-play thing," Hunt said.

My IT Helpdesk was also seeking affiliate partners to earn referral revenue only, he said.

He said resellers would need to get a valid list of email addresses from the customer and a couple of small technical tasks would also need to doing. But that was all, so the resources involved in implementing a Mail Protector sale were slight, he said.

Hunt said the main advantage to customers was the same as with any managed security service -- no need to waste resources on IT security, which was often time-consuming and expensive but non-core to businesses.

He said Dazz IT was founded in 1999 as a specialist provider of VoIP, PABX and IT communications and strategy, mainly for SMBs.

"But we do extend into corporates where we do some work in terms of strategy and things like that. We identified this opportunity in the market where customers are frustrated with having to buy pre-determined pieces of software and being locked in to long-term contracts," he said.

Mail Protector was available on a monthly basis. If customers didn't like it at any point, they could cancel their service from the following month, Hunt said.

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