OEM Case Studies: Stalker Software

Overview CommuniGate Systems licensed the Mailshell SDK to create a spam filter plugin for its award-winning CommuniGate Pro suite of messaging applications. Only 18 months later, CommuniGate Systems has sold more than 500 enterprise licenses, with customers including SMBs, ISPs, and large (>20,000 seats) universities and enterprises. The Mailshell Plugin for CommuniGate Pro: CommuniGate Systems' development team created a spam filtering plugin using the Mailshell SDK. The plugin was completed in less than a week, and launched in mid-March 2003, after QA and testing. Within two weeks of launch, CommuniGate Systems had sold the first six enterprise licenses for the plugin. How CommuniGate Systems and Mailshell Work Together: CommuniGate Systems handles all sales and marketing for the plugin, and provides Tier One support to its customers. Mailshell provides Tier Two support to CommuniGate Systems' customer service team. CommuniGate Systems elected to sell the plugin as a 12-month license, with fees on a sliding scale based on customer size. Mailshell provides quarterly software updates as well as hourly updates to the spam filtering rules and databases. Mailshell's SDK is available on a variety of platforms -- Linux, Windows, Solaris (Sparc and Intel), FreeBSD, Mac OS X, HP-UX and AIX - and CommuniGate Systems has paying customers on each. Customers report extremely high filter accuracy. CommuniGate Systems' recent internal benchmarks report greater than 98 percent of spam caught with less than one false positive per 5,000 messages. Rapid Growth - Recurring Revenue: Within 90 days of launch, CommuniGate Systems had sold more than 80 licenses, including more than 30 on Linux alone. CommuniGate Systems' customers quickly purchased 12-month licenses for the plugin as many system administrators wanted an integrated spam filter, sold and supported by CommuniGate Systems, a vendor they knew and trusted. Within 18 months, more than 500 of CommuniGate Systems' customers had purchased licenses for the Mailshell plugin.   Who is CommuniGate Systems? CommuniGate Systems is the technology leader in messaging solutions for more than 30 major computer platforms. The company's core technology merges security, reliability, scalability and a wide range of integrated services, with ease of deployment and maintenance. More than 8,000 customers worldwide, ranging from global telcos and ISPs to educational institutions and corporations, service millions of accounts with its CommuniGate Pro email software.   About Mailshell Mailshell is the world's leading anti-spam and anti-phishing engine provider. Via Mailshell's OEM partners, more than 6,000 companies and 10 million consumers worldwide rely on "Powered by Mailshell" filters to block spam and phishing. Mailshell's software helps its OEM partners, including CA, Secure Computing, Panda Software, Oracle, Grisoft (AVG), and ZyXEL, among others, generate new anti-spam revenue, upsell existing products to new anti-spam customers, and cut anti-spam engineering and support costs to near zero. Mailshell's headquarters are located in San Francisco.  Download CommuniGate Systems Case Study as a PDF* More Information OEM Case Studies    CommuniGate Systems    Analyst Report: Ferris Research on the OEM Anti-Spam Market* *requires Adobe Acrobat Reader