DecisionOne
Sales Leads Lost Due to Unsolicited Email
BUSINESS CHALLENGE
DecisionOne received more than a million
email messages each month – with nearly
80% of them being unsolicited, sometimes
obscene, messages. Not only did management
receive a number of complaints from
the company's 5,000 employees about the
high volume of spam, but DecisionOne operations
managers and sales professionals
also reported that important emails, including
some service dispatch requests and
potential sales leads, were being buried or
delayed amid the multitude of spam messages.
DecisionOne had to take action to
increase both revenue and employee satisfaction.
PROOFPOINT SOLUTION
DecisionOne deployed the Proofpoint Protection
Server to protect employees' mailboxes.
The Proofpoint Protection Server
protects DecisionOne by eradicating spam
at the network gateway and defending
against network-level attacks.
RESULTS ACHIEVED
DecisionOne was overwhelmed by the effectiveness
of the Proofpoint Protection
Server. The software went to work right
away and eliminates millions of unwanted
email messages with near-perfect accuracy.
PRODUCTS DEPLOYED
Proofpoint Protection Server
was one of the simplest
product implementations of
recent years and has virtually
eliminated spam with no
measurable level of false positives.
In more than 30 years
in this business I've never
received as many 'thank you'
notes from the field as I did
with this implementation.
Gene Dahl
CTO
DecisionOne
TACKLING SPAM IN A UNIQUE ENVIRONMENT Spam is more than just an annoyance. For DecisionOne, a company that provides
tailored information technology (IT) support services to businesses, spam meant lost
revenue.
Employees at the suburban Philadelphia-based company each received hundreds of email messages per day, and nearly 80% of them were unsolicited emails, meaning that the employees had to slog through a multitude of irrelevant messages just to find a legitimate business email. Important messages were often accidentally deleted with the mass quantities of spam. In particular, the sales staff at DecisionOne complained that it frequently lost email sales inquiries, resulting in lost potential revenue.
Based on the scores of complaints from sales staff and other frustrated employees, DecisionOne decided that it had to implement a technology solution to stopping unsolicited emails. DecisionOne had implemented a first-generation anti-spam filter, but found that it had poor accuracy and had a high rate of false positives, inadvertently trapping legitimate email along with unsolicited emails. The company then looked into other messaging security solutions and carefully reviewed the offerings from four vendors.
“We did a pilot with one of these vendors but found the software difficult to manage,” said Gene Dahl, CTO of DecisionOne. “The software was hard to tune, it had a high false positive rate and a lot of spam still leaked through. It didn't meet our requirements.”
IMMEDIATE SPAM ELIMINATION
DecisionOne then tested out the Proofpoint Protection Server and was blown away by
how well it worked. Dahl said, “The Proofpoint Protection Server went to work right out
of the box and worked with near perfect accuracy. The implementation was absolutely
effortless and required very little tuning on our part.”
The Proofpoint Protection Server is a complete spam control and messaging security system based on Proofpoint's MLX™ machine learning technology. Proofpoint MLX analyzes more than 100,000 structural and content attributes in each incoming email message, resulting in extremely high effectiveness with virtually zero false positives. Proofpoint MLX adapts to new threats instead of reacting after the fact, making it the industry's most effective email messaging security software. Proofpoint also detects and automatically prevents phishing, denial of service (DoS), directory harvest attacks and dictionary attacks, keeping users and networks safe from all types of messaging threats.
TOTAL MESSAGE PROTECTION
With Proofpoint Protection Server deployed at the mail gateway, all of DecisionOne's
incoming email is scanned by anti-virus software and is then inspected by the Proofpoint
Protection Server. Only legitimate email that is
safe from viruses and other threats is sent on to
employee inboxes.
“Proofpoint has made such a difference in our organization” said Dahl. “The sales staff is confident that it can now respond quickly to all incoming leads. Our email-based service request handling is much less affected by the floods of spam that used to bog down our gateways and mailboxes. We also have received dozens of notes from our employees raving about how they no longer receive any unwanted or offensive content in their inboxes.”
DecisionOne is looking forward to broadening its use of the Proofpoint Protection Server to fight other messaging threats, and is encouraged that Proofpoint is continually taking a proactive approach to dealing with the latest security threats by adding new modules to its software.
“The Proofpoint Protection Server was one of the simplest product implementations in recent years,” said Dahl. “It's as close to a perfect product as I've ever come across.”
ABOUT DECISIONONE
Headquartered in the Philadelphia suburb of
Frazer, Pennsylvania, DecisionOne serves
leading companies and government agencies
with tailored information technology
support services that maximize the return
on IT investments, minimize capital and
infrastructure costs and optimize operational
effectiveness. With more than 5,000
technology professionals, an extensive,
geographically distributed network of service
locations, and comprehensive OneSource
solutions, DecisionOne provides the coverage,
availability and response to satisfy
the technology support needs of its clients'
employees and customers. More information
on DecisionOne services can be found
on the company's website at www.decisionone.
com.
