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On several levels, email is the most important application used in business today: email is more important than the telephone for the vast majority of users, about 75% of the critical business content that users need on a daily basis is somehow bound up in their email system, and the typical user spends about 30% of his or her day doing something in their email client. In short, email is absolutely critical to the health and efficiency of just about any organization.
Because email is so critical, managing it properly and protecting it from the growing array of threats that impact it is becoming increasingly important. Systems designed to protect email systems and users from spam, viruses, malware, phishing attacks and other threats must be extremely effective, they must operate with virtually no downtime and they must be easy to manage.
To understand organizations’ perceptions about various email management systems, Sunbelt Software engaged Osterman Research to survey organizations that are using five different email management systems. This white paper presents the results of those findings, comparing Sunbelt Software’s Messaging Ninja with an average of the other four systems.
It is important to note two things about the research conducted for this white paper:
- As part of its proposal, Osterman Research gave Sunbelt Software the option to end the project after the research phase in the event that the survey results were not favorable. That did not happen.
- All of the products researched for this project had strong points and came out at or near the top in some categories that were researched. The products selected for this analysis are all very capable and in use by millions of customers worldwide. In other words, we did not select second-tier products for this analysis.
Methodology
In designing the survey methodology for this white paper, we wanted to obtain ‘real world’ results from users of various email management systems instead of relying on laboratory testing of these systems. Our thought was that by understanding how various email management systems are used in production environments, we could obtain a solid understanding of the relative pros and cons of each tool. Further, our methodology could obtain results, such as labor investments required to manage these systems, that would not be available via conventional laboratory testing.
A total of 93 Web-based surveys were conducted during September through November 2006 with North American organizations of various sizes. The respondents were drawn primarily from the Osterman Research Survey Panel, although Sunbelt Software also provided some contacts for this research, as well. The products on which we focused in the surveys were:
- Barracuda Spam Firewall
- GFI MailEssentials
- McAfee GroupShield for Microsoft Exchange
- Sunbelt Software Messaging Ninja
- Symantec Brightmail
We queried survey respondents about the use of these tools in their organizations and then focused the vast majority of the questions on the system with which respondents were most familiar. In order to qualify to complete the survey, respondents had to be involved in the management of their organizations’ messaging and/or networking systems, and they had to be using at least one of the products above.
Because we obtained results from small, mid-sized and large organizations, for part of this analysis we chose to narrow our review of the survey findings to organizations in the range of 100 to 6,000 email users. Our goal was to provide an ‘apples-to-apples’ comparison for things like the number of full-time equivalent (FTE) staff members required to manage various email management systems, eliminating both very small and very large organizations. For other data points that were not dependent on organization size, such as ratings for satisfaction with improvements in spam capture efficiency over time, we used the entire data set that we obtained.
Further, because this white paper was sponsored by Sunbelt Software, we chose to compare that company’s Messaging Ninja offering – discussed later in this report – with the combined results of the other systems we surveyed instead of comparing Messaging Ninja to the other four products individually.
As an independent research organization that remains vendor agnostic, we wish to report that Messaging Ninja fared very well in our findings, but some of the other products in this analysis also fared quite well, leading some categories.
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