Posted on 29 March 2010

Newton, Mass., March 23, 2010 – Mimecast®, a holistic email management company offering SaaS-based email archiving, continuity, security and policy control, today announced that Altour, one of the largest travel companies in the United States, improved the reliability and performance of its email operations by deploying the Mimecast Unified Email Management (UEM) solution. Using the innovative SaaS solution, Altour significantly reduced the administrative costs of maintaining their on-premise email servers while gaining new archiving and continuity features to improve business operations.

 

Email is crucial to the company’s performance as it is not only deeply embedded in many automated, customer-facing facets of the business, such as reservation confirmations, but it also is the primary communications vehicle for travel agents and staff. With a small technology support staff serving a large, global workforce, Altour was forced to focus the majority of its IT resources towards ensuring the system was operational and was not able to integrate advanced archiving within its infrastructure.

 

“With limited resources, we found ourselves facing an uphill battle in keeping up with the needs of our growing business,” said Altour’s IT Director Manny Amare. “While we were able to avoid email outages, other weaknesses within our operations – such as outdated archiving practices – soon began to emerge that made us rethink our email management strategy. The high costs and required administration of on-premise solutions led us to look at cloud computing as a way to offload the risk, complexity and overall cost of our email operations and free the IT staff to conduct more strategic IT projects.”

 

Like many enterprises, acquisitions and mergers left Altour with a complicated infrastructure composed of multiple legacy email systems, cross domains and forwarding servers. Despite this heterogeneous infrastructure, Mimecast worked with Amare to smoothly migrate the company’s 500 users across 70 locations around the United States to the SaaS-based Mimecast UEM solution.

 

Altour’s email infrastructure has been greatly simplified due to its partnership with Mimecast. Archiving is automated, and retrieval can be performed in a matter of seconds using Mimecast’s web interface. In addition, the Mimecast UEM also replaced the company’s aging anti-spam/anti-virus appliance – which had provided adequate, but not outstanding, coverage and was due for replacement or upgrade shortly. Since moving to Mimecast, the average quarterly volume of email that gets through to Altour users is approximately 360,000, while the average quarterly volume of spam that’s blocked from entering the network is over 1,000,000.

Altour avoided spending more than $75,000 on additional backup hardware it was planning on purchasing prior to deploying the Mimecast UEM and experiencing the breadth of its capabilities.

 

“We are delighted to see clients utilizing cloud computing as a means to transform their IT department from a help desk to a competitive differentiator,” added Mary Kay Roberto, Mimecast’s SVP and general manager. “More and more, enterprises are seeing cloud computing not only as a cost-cutting measure – but as a means to offload administration of operations that are outside of their core competency. Mimecast provides enterprises with innovative, reliable solutions that lower costs and heighten operational efficiency to help them compete in the marketplace.”

 

About Altour

Established in 1991 by seasoned industry leader Alexandre Chemla, ALTOUR has grown to become one of the most sophisticated and highly respected global leaders in the travel world today. ALTOUR is among the largest agencies serving the luxury and mid-market travel niches today with more than 1,000 travel professionals located throughout the United States and in Europe. For more information, please visit www.ALTOUR.com.

 

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