Gaming-industry leader turns to MessageLabs solutions to enhance productivity and reduce costs

“It was absolutely pervasive within our company,” explains Joe Pazos, Manager of Corporate IT at Oberon. “The huge deluge of spam and viruses in the marketplace made it very difficult for our internal staff to communicate with each other because almost 80% of the e-mail they were receiving was spam. It affected productivity in the company, not just in the U.S. but on a global level.”

A Worldwide Enterprise
Founded in 2003, Oberon Media has 550 employees and is headquartered in New York with offices across North America, Europe and Asia. The company has broad market distribution via a variety of online networks such as MSN, Yahoo and MySpace.

Oberon also has over 100 business partners around the globe. The far-flung business includes mobile gaming in which the company provides games on handsets through major carriers such as AT&T and Verizon.

“Oberon also does retail gaming in which we sell games that we develop ourselves,” adds Pazos. “We also repackage games from other distributors through our publishing division and we have distribution of games via TV set boxes that let you play games through your cable connection.”  

Loss of Productivity
When the negative effects of spam and viruses spread throughout Oberon, Pazos and his colleagues decided it was time to get help. “We made a business decision to pick a partner who would allow us to reduce the amount of spam that we received into our e-mail systems and because of that, allow us to become more productive.

“In some companies when people get spam they just take the time to delete it, but when you start to multiply the time it takes to delete spam by the number of users in a huge company like ours, there’s a significant loss of productivity within a large cross-section of users and it negatively affects your bottom line.

“From another perspective, since a lot of spam e-mail is offensive, you have a liability risk with your employees and you have to be sure that you protect the company’s interests. But just as important, people working for our company shouldn’t be subjected to that kind of e-mail. We want to make sure we insulate them from those offensive messages – it’s simply the right thing to do for our employees.”

Searching for a Solution
When the Oberon executives shopped for anti-spam and anti-virus solutions, many vendors made claims that they have a “99.9 percent success rate for spam removal” or that they “set the industry standard.”

But when Pazos and his colleagues met with MessageLabs, they heard something different. “The people from MessageLabs said, ‘We catch 100 percent of the spam and 100 percent of the viruses all the time.’ They explained that their solutions have a proprietary custom algorithm that checks the validity of every single e-mail. No one else made that kind of statement and that’s the main reason that we partnered with MessageLabs.”

Oberon has been contracted with ML since September of 2007. Pazos has experienced the effectiveness of the MessageLabs Anti-Spam Service firsthand. He has had the service on his personal e-mail since October of last year, and since then he has received only one spam e-mail. Prior to using the MessageLabs solution, he received as many as 100 spam e-mails per day.

“Before we used MessageLabs, when our employees would go on business trips in which they’d be on a plane for five or six hours, when they got off the plane and turned on their BlackBerry or their laptop, they’d have to weed through many spam e-mails which is difficult, annoying and time-consuming,” says Pazos. “The MessageLabs Anti-Spam Service has reduced our employees’ spam e-mails to practically none, which has drastically increased the productivity of my staff and colleagues.”

“Local” Solutions Aren’t Enough
When it comes to anti-virus protection, many companies feel that as long as they have a “local” anti-virus solution on their computers they’ll be virus-free, but local anti-virus solutions can’t catch everything.

“Most of the delivery of viruses that come into a system these days is usually via e-mail, so if you have a localized client to catch it, once it’s gotten into your system, it’s too late,” says Pazos. “The MessageLabs Anti-Virus Service catches the spam before it even gets delivered to our users’ in-boxes. Our company hasn’t received any virus infections via e-mail in the six months that we’ve been using the MessageLabs solution.” 

The Need for Archiving
Email communication is so critical to Oberon, management made a decision to also implement the MessageLabs Archiving Service to ensure that employees had internal controls for archiving and for the ability to produce important e-mails in the event of legal issues.

According to Osterman Research, a hosted archiving service has distinct benefits: “There are two basic methods for providing an archiving capability: in-house solutions and hosted services. While each has its advantages, there are some important benefits from the use of a hosted service including lower cost of ownership, faster deployment, and higher reliability.”

Pazos expresses his satisfaction with the MessageLabs Archiving Service, “If certain e-mails are accidentally deleted and we have some kind of legal issue, we want to make sure we have them. By doing archiving, you remove the archiving burden from the local desktop and increase the productivity of your employees. The MessageLabs Archiving solution retains all of our important e-mails automatically, which reduces the overhead on our internal e-mail system and lets us use best practices for archiving. The service has been a great asset for our global organization.”

Impressive Results
According to Pazos, Oberon receives an average of about 100,000 e-mails a week and MessageLabs Anti-Spam Service detects about 30,000 as spam and automatically deletes them before they reach users’ in-boxes. Pazos estimates that MessageLabs Anti-Spam saves Oberon an estimated $100,000 per year in time saved only from deleting spam emails.

In the 11 months that Oberon Media has used MessageLabs Anti-Virus, the company hasn’t received any viruses via email. Considering the productivity loss associated with virus removal (including end user and support resources required) the company has saved hundreds of hours of labor costs over that time period.

Elimination of any potential viruses has created a more secure, productive workforce because Oberon’s support staff can focus on profit driving activities instead of “putting out fires” due to viruses.

These recent statistics from Oberon Media’s MessageLabs client portal illustrate the effectiveness of MessageLabs Anti-Virus at the company:

• Average number of viruses captured in a 7-day period: 488
• Average number of viruses captured in a 30-day period: 2,507
• Total viruses captured in an 11-month period: 29,538 
  MessageLabs Archiving solution has enabled Oberon to free-up their infrastructure by transferring a large amount of important emails to MessageLabs. “By having a searchable index and copies of every email received in our environment, we can feel secure about leaving the responsibility of archiving to MessageLabs,” says Pazos.

Pazos cites a specific example in which the Archiving solution benefited the company: “In dealing with a recent business issue, we needed to refer to an old email from a departed employee that was related to specific commitments we made to a customer. By using MessageLabs Archiving, we were able to quickly verify the information presented to the client and the issue was resolved. If we didn’t have the immediate access to archived email that MessageLabs Archiving provides, it would have taken days to retrieve the information.” 

Looking Ahead
For the future, Oberon Media is looking to implement the MessageLabs solution for instant messaging. “Instant messaging is the ‘back door’ for spam and viruses,” adds Pazos. “It’s another mode of entry for virus writers and it’s the only possible entry for spam and viruses that our company doesn’t have protected by MessageLabs.”

Pazos and his colleagues at Oberon Media are very satisfied with MessageLabs solutions: “The solutions have allowed me to focus back on my business and not be in a perpetual firefight against spam and viruses. They’ve let me take control of my environment once again and allowed me to get back to the business of enabling our company to produce the best content possible for our customers and partners.”