SMX posts strong growth as Cloud gains traction

5 December 2012

SMX posts strong growth as Cloud gains traction

SMX has posted strong growth for the 2012 calendar year with a 30 percent increase in revenue, boosted by major new channel partners – both in New Zealand and in high focus export markets such as Australia and Japan.

SMX’s vice president global sales, Tiaan Blaauw, said there were three major drivers for growth: first the rapid move to the Cloud with SMX’s software as a service email security solution representing a low-risk entry-point to the cloud, replacing appliance-type hardware requiring upgrade and annual licence costs; second, strong demand for locally hosted email security; and third, the white labelling and rapid provisioning features of SMX that made SMX ideally suited to a channel sales model.

“The whole issue of privacy and security of email has come into sharp focus around issues such as Kim Dotcom and the US Homeland Security Act. Customers – particularly large corporate and Government sector organizations – do not want their email filtered offshore outside local jurisdiction and control,” Tiaan Blaauw said.

“Our strategy of local in-country hosting has resulted, for example, in SMX becoming the leading supplier of SaaS email filtering to New Zealand Government organizations. That ‘in country’ capability has also been instrumental in our selection by Fujitsu in New Zealand and Australia for their software as a service for their customers around the region.

“In country hosting was also a major factor in our largest single sale in Japan where a single reseller deal with internet hosting company Ride, added 40,000 users at 7,000 Ride customers around Japan. The effects of the Tsunami in Japan – when despite massive business disruption – no local datacenters went down – has stimulated a major shift in Japanese acceptance of the Cloud model – with major interest in replacing in-house appliance-based email filtering systems with a software as a service solution such as SMX. We currently have three very large sales in advanced negotiation in Japan. It’s difficult to gain a foothold in the Japanese market, but we now have that foothold and have a good basis for our strong Japanese growth forecast in 2013.”

Blaauw said strong channel growth in New Zealand was also a major feature of 2012, with new partners including Ricoh, Revera, and Computer Concepts Limited (CCL).

“All of these new partners illustrate how the rapid provisioning and easy white labelling features of SMX are driving new business for us,” Blaauw said. Many of our larger partners are integrating SMX into their software as a service offerings to customers and using email filtering as an entry point to differentiated Cloud service offerings.”

Ends.

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