”Within the first month, staff productivity levels rose dramatically due to the fact that SPAM virtually disappeared from reaching email inboxes.”
Geoff Craig
IT Manager, JB HI-FI.

In 2000 JB HI-FI was purchased by a consortium of investors and senior management who grew the number of stores to 23, floating on the Australian Stock Exchange in 2003. Today, with 32 stores, JB HI-FI is Australia's fastest growing independent retailer of home entertainment and recorded music and movies in the country – all at Australia's cheapest prices.

In May 2004, JB HI-FI became MailGuard’s 600th customer. MailGuard provides outsourced email anti-virus, anti-SPAM, content filtering and email storage solutions for the small to medium market (SME) market in Australia.

Today, MailGuard filters over 500,000 emails daily. Companies across multiple industry segments have adopted MailGuard’s services as a means to dramatically simplify management, protect against SPAM, viruses and unwanted emails in order to provide enhanced messaging capabilities.

“With email increasingly a mission-critical application for our day-to-day business activity, security management of our incoming and outgoing email was a major concern to us,” said Geoff Craig, JB HI-FI IT Manager. “But it had to be an external solution that proactively and continuously managed all of the company’s email correspondence. We’re a small IT team and I cannot afford to have one of my guys virtually spending their entire time looking after email security issues.”

Craig maintains that the MailGuard solution proved to be a cost saving to his organisation – which prides itself on being a lean working machine, keeping costs down in order to pass on any possible savings to customers at any of its 32 stores.

His lean IT team can now focus 100 per cent on servicing the technology needs of the organisation and its staff to ensure that it continues to deliver to the public Australia’s most extensive range of audio/visual home entertainment equipment and the largest instore selection of audio CD and movie DVD titles in Australia.

After an initial pilot, JB HI-FI implemented MailGuard to filter all email passing through or leaving any of its stores or head office.

The implementation took one and a half hours without any disruption to the network.

Delivering much more than email security

Within the first month, staff productivity levels rose dramatically due to the fact that SPAM virtually disappeared reaching email inboxes. Additionally, Craig’s team can turn off or on what the users are able to receive via email. Further benefits include the fact that Craig can access the JB HI-FI email activity status and statistics remotely through the web-enabled portal from anywhere and at any time. Substantial processing time has been freed up from the JB HI-FI mail server and storage capacity has also grown.

The MailGuard solution has been welcomed by JB HI-FI’s senior management who was also keen to ensure that the business had a secure and easy-to-manage service to control both SPAM and viruses in its email network.

“The fact that JB HI-FI has chosen MailGuard to service its email security needs nationally is very gratifying and endorses our commitment to the provision of the highest level of outsourced email security at an attractive price point for business,” said Director of Marketing, Andrew Johnson.

Craig maintains, ”Given tight IT budgets, increased concerns around email security and pressures to make IT investments deliver on promised ROI, we’re delighted with MailGuard’s outsourced email solutions in securing the company’s message networks against SPAM and virus attacks, as well as ensuring user email policies are followed.”

Currently, JB HI-FI is also trialing MailGuard’s outsourced business email archival solution – SafeGuard®. “In today's corporate world, email holds a company's critical information. Emails record financial expectations, sales are made, customers make complaints and companies make promises. The awareness and understanding of the importance of storing email data has really hit the business world,” concluded Johnson.