Belay Development

Technology Consultant Provides Clients with Easy, Reliable Hosted Messaging Service

Belay Development, a technology consulting firm, often recommends a hosted messaging service to its clients. These clients—which vary in size and industry—frequently need a spam and antivirus filter. Some also need archiving, continuity, and encryption services. When the quality of a previous service provider dropped, Belay switched to Microsoft® Exchange Hosted Services. Now Belay clients of all sizes gain consistent, thorough spam and antivirus filtering and reliable delivery of outgoing mail without blacklisting problems. Some clients also take advantage of additional encryption and retention services. By recommending a messaging service that works simply and easily with minimal investment, Belay improves its relationships with clients and frees internal and client resources to focus on strategic technology issues.

Situation

Recommending Exchange Hosted Services makes our relationships with clients stronger. We recommend it, and then the client says, ‘This is great. These guys really know what they’re talking about.’  Joshua Shaw Chief Executive Officer Belay Development

Belay Development is a consulting firm that provides strategic, technical, and creative services. “We offer end-to-end solutions for our clients from a technology perspective,” says Joshua Shaw, Chief Executive Officer of Belay Development, “spanning application development, software development, and infrastructure support and development.” Founded in Los Angeles, California, in 2002 as a one-person Web development shop, Belay has since expanded to 24 employees with two branch offices in the Southwest.

“We see our clients not as projects but as relationships,” says Shaw. “We see ourselves as the technology arm of our clients.” Although clients vary from Fortune 500 companies and venture-capital startups to independent musicians and nonprofit organizations, the consistent factor is that they trust Belay, a Microsoft® Gold Certified Partner, to proactively manage their technology strategies and needs.

Messaging is a primary concern for many of those clients. “Smaller and medium-sized companies often don’t have the infrastructure to limit the amount of spam and other potentially damaging messaging coming in, nor to control how mail is being delivered,” says Ryan Jacobs, IT Group Practice Director at Belay Development. Shaw adds, “Spam filtering is a core problem that almost all our clients face, and some also face encryption and archiving needs. Our responsibility is to find the best of breed, best cost-to-performance-ratio product or service, and say to our clients, ‘You asked us to tell you how to fix your problems and how to make your company run better; this is it.’”

Though Belay tailors each solution to unique client needs, it often recommends a hosted messaging service rather than setting up hardware and software onsite. “A service doesn’t require any management or maintenance or hardware or software overhead for the client,” says Shaw. “Furthermore, if you’re going to use it as a redundant disaster-recovery business-continuity solution, it needs to be offsite. So these aren’t functions we typically recommend that a client maintain or manage themselves.”

In July and August 2006, Belay found that the quality of services from its hosted messaging service provider dropped off significantly. “I don’t know whether they weren’t able to keep up with the changing tactics of the spammers or what the issue was,” says Jacobs, “but we saw a significant increase in spam over the last few months we were with that service.” Belay became increasingly uncomfortable recommending that service to its clients and started to look for a new option.

Solution

For its internal needs, Belay considered a move to an appliance-based solution such as the Barracuda Spam Firewall or IronPort Anti-Spam. “But the additional management overhead and the costs of implementation meant that an appliance-based solution didn’t really make a lot of sense for our company,” says Jacobs. Belay also considered managed services such as MX Logic, Postini, and Postica. But Jacobs and Shaw found that performance of these solutions was not up to the company’s high standards.

Of the four services we evaluated, Exchange Hosted Services does the best job of staying ahead of spammers.  Ryan Jacobs IT Group Practice Director Belay Development

“When we became a Microsoft Certified Partner,” says Jacobs, “we had an opportunity to move to Microsoft Exchange Hosted Services. So we switched. We were so happy with the service that we immediately started moving our customers who were on other services to Exchange Hosted Services.”

Belay and several of its clients now use Microsoft Exchange Hosted Services as a spam and antivirus filter and also to help address corporate e-mail compliance, security, and availability requirements. The managed service model is designed to remove incoming e-mail threats before they reach customer firewalls and to support multiple e-mail platforms such as Microsoft Exchange Server.

The service’s key component is Microsoft Exchange Hosted Filtering, which routes all incoming e-mail to the Microsoft global data center network. E-mail messages flagged as spam can be quarantined for up to 15 days or sent to a specific user’s mailbox, such as an IT administrator, for review.

Exchange Hosted Services includes three additional services:

• Microsoft Exchange Hosted Archive archives e-mail and instant messages to help companies meet legal and regulatory requirements.
• Microsoft Exchange Hosted Continuity stores a month’s worth of e-mail that can be accessed during a planned or unplanned outage. Users can compose, receive, and send e-mail messages in real time.
• Microsoft Exchange Hosted Encryption provides policy-based message encryption from sender to recipient.

Benefits

By recommending Exchange Hosted Services to its clients, Belay helps them reliably reduce spam and improve message delivery while they minimize investments in infrastructure. Belay can recommend services such as Exchange Hosted Archive and Exchange Hosted Encryption based on a client’s needs and thus strengthen relationships in which Belay serves as a trusted technology advisor.

The unique thing about Exchange Hosted Services is that regardless of what kind of IT environment you have, this solution will help you sanitize the mail coming in.  Ryan Jacobs IT Group Practice Director Belay Development

Reduce Spam with Minimal Investment

Exchange Hosted Services lets clients of all sizes improve spam and virus protection without having to invest in new hardware. “We have customers with as few as five seats who use Exchange Hosted Services, customers that have as many as 3,500 seats, and all in between,” says Jacobs. “The unique thing about Exchange Hosted Services is that regardless of what kind of IT environment you have, this solution helps you sanitize the mail coming in.”

When some clients come to Belay, they have been receiving thousands of junk e-mail messages a day in each mailbox. Jacobs says, “When we cut them over to Exchange Hosted Services, within a matter of days, they are down to just legitimate mail coming through with almost no false positives popping up. So they are able to significantly reduce not only the junk in their mailboxes but also the bandwidth their environment requires.”

Furthermore, this service is consistent and thorough. “Of the four services we evaluated, Exchange Hosted Services does the best job of staying ahead of spammers. And with the power of Microsoft behind Exchange Hosted Services, it will continue to be a frontrunner there,” Jacobs says.

Reliably Deliver Outgoing Mail

Several clients with problems sending legitimate e-mail messages come to Belay. They want a messaging system to help them send from multiple places and monitor blacklists.

For example, Jacobs says, “One client had significant issues sending to AOL and Yahoo addresses because the subnet from which they were sending their mail was being blacklisted. So they couldn’t communicate with any of their customers who used either of those environments. Sending mail through Exchange Hosted Services allowed them to have their messages delivered to their customers in a timely fashion.”

Jacobs believes this benefit will increase in importance in the future, as it becomes more difficult for small and medium-sized businesses to keep up with evolving messaging security standards. “As it becomes more difficult to send messages, the fact that Exchange Hosted Services can take on that responsibility for our customers is critical.”

Provide Options Customized to Client Needs

Because Belay works for many different types of companies in many different industries, clients’ needs vary. “Some clients have HIPAA or SEC requirements forcing them to encrypt their messages,” says Jacobs. “Others have retention policies due to Sarbanes-Oxley or SEC requirements. Exchange Hosted Services has features that can do all of that.”

Furthermore, Belay can offer Exchange Hosted Services to its clients under a Services Provider License Agreement, which offers the hosted service on a monthly basis. “Customers can sign up and try out Exchange Hosted Services,” says Jacobs. “And if they don’t like it, after a month or three months, they can switch off and use something else. It’s been great for us and our clients.”

Strengthen Client Relationships

“Most of our clients aren’t in the technology field,” says Jacobs. “They’re focusing on their day-to-day business, rather than managing their IT environment. They just want something that works.” When Belay recommends Exchange Hosted Services, clients like its reliability, its consistency, and especially its ease of use. But the move to a messaging solution is often just a first step.

“Recommending Exchange Hosted Services makes our relationships with clients stronger,” Shaw says. “We recommend it, and then the client says, ‘This is great. These guys really know what they’re talking about.’ When you recommend and implement a service that performs to the client’s expectations or even exceeds them, the client is far more likely to come back to you and say, ‘You fixed that problem for me. I have six more problems. Which one do you want to work on next?’”

Some clients have gone on to use Belay for infrastructure projects or Web development projects. Several are moving to develop a sophisticated messaging infrastructure, going beyond straight point-A-to-point-B delivery of messages to complementary services such as encryption or journaling. “E-mail is still a fairly primitive form of communication,” Shaw says, “in that the core technology hasn’t changed in many, many years. But that’s changing, and I think the Microsoft Unified Communications initiative is going to help companies develop a far more sophisticated and efficient communication medium. And in the long term, Exchange Hosted Services already has enough different services to help our clients move along that path.” Shaw is especially pleased to be able to show clients this clear path to a better future.

Furthermore, the managed service model means that neither the clients nor Belay staffers have to invest in resources to manage it. “It’s easy for us to manage multiple clients in Exchange Hosted Services,” says Jacobs, “and be able to provide them all with great service. The result is that our clients can focus on what they have to focus on, which is their business. And we at Belay can focus on more strategic issues for our clients—really helping them solve the issues that are preventing them from doing their business efficiently and effectively.”

For More Information

For more information about Microsoft products and services, call the Microsoft Sales Information Center at (800) 426-9400. In Canada, call the Microsoft Canada Information Centre at (877) 568-2495. Customers who are deaf or hard-of-hearing can reach Microsoft text telephone (TTY/TDD) services at (800) 892-5234 in the United States or (905) 568-9641 in Canada. Outside the 50 United States and Canada, please contact your local Microsoft subsidiary. To access information using the World Wide Web, go to:
http://www.microsoft.com/

For more information about Belay Development products and services, call (310) 823-0121 or visit the Web site at:
http://www.belaydevelopment.com/

Microsoft Server Product Portfolio

For more information about the Microsoft server product portfolio, go to:
www.microsoft.com/servers/default.mspx

For more information about Microsoft Exchange Hosted Services, go to:
www.microsoft.com/exchange

This case study is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY.

Document published February 2008