Packing and labelling company CCL Industries Inc. recently repacked its own e-mail system into one box.
Over the past few years, Toronto-based CCL has redesigned its networks, created a common data centre, and also wanted to centralize
its e-mail onto one server. The company chose Toronto-based It4ce for its Mail4ce Compression Suite product which can reduce e-mail attachments “”by typically 40 to 50 per cent,”” says It4ce vice-president of sales Joe DaSilva.
Mail4ce compresses e-mail and allows it to traverse a WAN more quickly. “”So if a client reduces e-mail, there probably will not be a need to upgrade the WAN at all, and even if there is a need to upgrade, it will be slight, not a tripling or quadrupling of the current bandwidth,”” says DaSilva.
The gateway component of the suite compresses inbound messages from the Internet. The compression client then runs in conjunction with Outlook to decompress the e-mail, invisible to the end user.
When a user sends an e-mail, the process reverses to compress at the user end, then decompressing through the Gateway and out to the Internet, unless the recipient is also a user of Mail4ce — then the system knows to keep it compressed.
CCL is one of the world’s largest manufacturing, packaging and labeling companies, supplying for customers that offer consumer brands in foods to pharmaceuticals to hygiene products. The company employs over 7,000 workers in North and Central America and Europe.
“”We have been using the Mail4ce Compression Gateway for six months without any significant glitches. We have carefully started our migration of e-mail accounts from a number of remote sites in Canada and the U.S. to our centralized solution. We plan to continue with this initiative over the next year or so,”” says Brian Madill, IT Director for CCL.
Another customer, Marks & Clerk, patent and trademark attorneys in London, U.K., ran a two-month pilot with the solution, “”and were so pleased with the outcome that we continue to use it four months later,”” says Exchange administrator Paresh Gami. “”We gave it to our branch that was most technologically impaired and they did just fine.””
Enterprises are looking towards server consolidation because it lowers operating costs and increases reliability in speed while freeing up data store. “”Successes in consolidation will be due to e-mail servers, along with storage and back-up capabilities enabling customers to trust putting thousands of users on a single server,”” says Mark Levitt, an IDC analyst based in Boston.
To implement a Mail4ce starter pack for 250 users is US$2,500, or half price for 1,000 users at US$5,000. A network administrator can put up the Gateway component in a day, according to the company, while the client system will need a strategy to install depending on the number of users. For 500 users, it would take approximately two to three days, notes DaSilva. Currently the program is available for Windows and Outlook users.
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