MailWise. Intelligent Choices Deliver Big Results.
It didn’t happen overnight, but the switch to the Mac at email security firm MailWise occurred far faster than CEO and CTO David Strickler ever dreamed. This dynamic company serves a range of clients from major corporations and universities to government agencies and not-for-profits, delivering managed email security services that filter spam out of email and stop viruses and other threats before they reach companies’ networks. With thousands of customers, each having different email security needs, and regulation compliance requirements, MailWise hefts a heavy engineering and programming load. In addition to engineering and software development, the company must also support sales and marketing efforts successfully—all within a relatively small budget.
These business tasks had previously been accomplished almost solely on PCs, but then employees within the organization began adopting the Mac. First one engineer brought his Mac from home. His work was so impressive that other employees couldn’t help looking over his shoulder to see why he was working so efficiently. Then one of the top software developers switched to the Mac and began developing code faster than anyone else on the team.
The Mac users were not only working more productively, but also were more inspired and creative. Soon, others at the company were requesting Macs. Even Strickler himself switched to the Mac, turning a lot of heads in the process. A recognized technology guru who studied computer engineering at Boston University, friends and colleagues were well aware of Strickler’s affinity for the PC. But his enthusiasm, fueled by ample proof that his employees were doing their best work on the Mac, became ignited by Apple technology.
“When I switched to the Mac, I expected to be pleased by some things and infuriated by others, because, normally, that’s just how technology is,” Strickler says. “With the Mac, there’s no downside. Every day, I become more impressed with its capabilities.”
Outwitting smart spammers
The Mac is the center of MailWise’s business operations, from marketing and engineering to software development in order to keep companies’ email systems spam-free. Corporations today must safeguard their intellectual property and ensure that they comply with laws and regulations like Sarbanes-Oxley and HIPAA. Using a proprietary artificial intelligence engine, MailWise’s filters capture a high degree of spam. However, because spammers are clever, fast-moving targets, MailWise’s experts constantly monitor the spam landscape and hand-feed specific rules into anti-spam filtering systems to stay ahead of the game.
“Our biggest challenge is that there’s no ‘one size fits all’ solution, whether we’re putting together a professional-looking customer proposal using an iWork application or designing a highly secure, tailored email solution,” says Strickler. “The Mac enables us to stay very flexible in meeting customer needs. Things simply don’t take nearly as much time on the Mac as they do on a PC, and we can boost the quality of our materials with easy to use solutions like Pages and Keynote.”
Tasks made more efficient
MailWise’s technical wizardry has catapulted the company into exponential growth, making it among the best-in-class anti-spam services companies in the world—all with only 13 talented, productive employees. Strickler lends credit to the Mac for enabling the company to sustain its upward climb and maintain a high level of revenue per employee.
Programmers can work swiftly by dragging and dropping code between the graphical user interface and the command-line interface of Mac OS X Leopard—without the need to reformat any code. Engineers can log in remotely to Linux-based servers in MailWise’s multi-million-dollar data center and check on the status of any server in the facility to help meet specified service-level agreements. In some cases, the team runs Windows on the Mac virtually to test PC compatibility, eliminating the need to purchase an additional PC and resulting in per-user savings of about $1800 every three years.
The team collects statistics on how a particular server is running, drop the data into a Numbers spreadsheet, create a graph within a few minutes, and meet to discuss the server’s performance. Recalls Strickler, “Extracting the performance data we needed and putting it into a usable format took much longer on the PC.”
Leopard Server: rock-solid reliability
After seeing substantial productivity increases from using Mac desktops and laptops, MailWise decided to expand its use of Apple technology to include an Xserve system running Leopard Server. The Xserve, deployed in the MailWise data center, runs Mail email and the company’s Virtual Private Network (VPN), in addition to data backup and archiving using Time Machine. “Thousands of companies rely on us to properly run their email systems, so our own system also has to run flawlessly,” says Strickler. “Of all the email systems out there, we chose to run Mail. It is easy to implement and administer, runs cleanly, and is highly reliable.”
Small tasks, big timesavings
The built-in capabilities of Mac OS X Leopard and Leopard Server contribute to employee productivity in a wide variety of ways. With iCal Server, employees can share their calendars with co-workers for prompt meeting scheduling and judicious distribution of workloads. Impromptu meetings are a snap with the Mac. The company uses an iMac and iChat for spur-of-the-moment, videoconferences with employees located in remote offices.
Employees use Automator in Mac OS X to accomplish routine tasks like regular system cleanup, saving an additional 30 to 45 minutes each day. Using the To Do feature in iCal to organize and prioritize tasks, the team can unify its work into a single location to save time and resolve scheduling conflicts. Pages and Keynote enable staff to create sleek-looking, customized marketing materials like proposals and presentations with ease and efficiency that wasn’t possible using previous solutions. And engineers and software developers use RSS feeds in Mail to stay up to date with technical news and information, saving nearly an hour a day that would otherwise be spent conducting research on the Internet.
The time saved by employees is invaluable, but remarkable hard-cost savings are an added bonus for the business. Simply by replacing traditional office productivity software with iWork, the company saves about $400 per seat annually in software licensing fees.
Expect the Mac to work: and it does
For Strickler, the most impressive aspect of the Mac is how it helps people do their best work in less time and provides all of the tools needed to handle everything from technical coding to marketing. “There really is no obvious, black-and-white difference between a Mac and a PC,” he says. “It’s more like a thousand little things that add up to the ability to get more work done in less time and enjoy doing it. But the main thing I’ve noticed is that people just expect everything to work when they are using a Mac—and it does.”
