What is our primary use case?
We are focused on the MRR and the MSP revenue is the main one. This shifts the relationships to long-term with our customers. Our aim is to raise the bar of the customer satisfaction and value we provide.
SpamTitan is a natural add-on for our portfolio of MSP and MSSP offerings. We love upsells, so all the customers will eventually be offered the other products from TitanHQ, but it will be step by step. Usually, it takes time to onboard a new customer. We distinguish technologies, processes and people onboarding. This is the reverse order by importance, but the right one in the timescales.
Spam protection is not a new thing on the market and most customers have some other solutions in place. When we replace another MSP, we inherit agreements that can't be cancelled today. We onboard customers with many different technologies, so we have to provide service for them and wait for the contract to expire before we can replace that technology.
We use SpamTitan to reduce to amount of time our clients' employees spend on spam emails and protect them from malicious links and attachments to improve overall IT security. These are the primary use cases. With inflation in salaries, we don't want to waste the time of our customers and employees. Also, even if we provide IT security awareness training, some people may still click or respond to something in the wrong way. The e-mail channel is still the prefered method for virus distribution.
Every employee faces an avalanche of emails daily, so one doesn't want to make the picture worse. It is preferable to remove as much as possible and still have that self-learning mechanism.
How has it helped my organization?
Most potential customers worldwide are aware of spam and malicious emails, so it's an easy sell. We don't have to convince them or provide a lot of use cases. It's enough to compare the competing solutions and what they can do.
We use SpamTitan in-house, and we recommend it to our customers. We don't have to explain how it will impact user productivity. They know it's something essential. If they don't have an anti-spam solution, they must deal with a lot of spam, which is very time-consuming. A standard office user spends between 30 and 120 minutes daily sorting through emails.
It becomes more effective as time goes on. Users receive reports and provide suggestions about what to do. After a while, the system learns what is safe or malicious, becoming more precise with fewer false positives.
What is most valuable?
SpamTitan is perfectly suited for MSPs. It's easy to use and sell. It's also straightforward to configure and monitor. In my opinion, software developers at TitanHQ did an excellent job with SpamTitan.
What needs improvement?
There are some minor technical aspects of the portals and management interface that could be improved, but there's nothing that prevents us from doing the job.
Most of the cloud-based service providers allow us to dive deeply into all the customers from a single console. Currently, I can only see our company on the console and not any of the customers, i.e. a multitenancy approach is required for every partner portal tenant. A single pane of glass.
The geo-blocking features could have more customization options. For example, our technical operations are based in Bulgaria. Same for VMware Bulgaria, HPE Bulgaria, etc. If you geo-block India and Bulgaria, there is no way to communicate with the HP call centres.
The big problem is that many companies have a very basic IT setup. They can improve security at the foundational level at least. Any product like SpamTitan will do much better because most of the issues will be removed.
SpamTitan will be busy with the tricky parts and not the basic ones. If you install and start using SpamTitan, where the IT maturity is low, you'll have a lot of false positives, and it will ask the user for suggestions. The customer might say, "Actually, this new product is not very good. It's asking me for everything." I would say, "Yes, it's because your organisation didn't do your job before that."
In other words, SpamTitan isn't the whole solution to the problem. SpamTitan needs someone to sort out the IT security audits and rectify the discovered issues or vulnerabilities to ensure all the prerequisites are there. After that, SpamTitan will do a proper job, but not every managed service provider or IT company understands that well. Again maturity is critical and it is applicable against MSPs, not only the customers.
For how long have I used the solution?
I used SpamTitan in various roles for the last few years. We are a relatively new MSP in the UK, but the Bulgarian MSP has been in business for 21 years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
Email isn't real-time communication, so no one will notice if an outage isn't more than half an hour. I've never had any complaints from our users or customers. I would assume there were no outages at all. If there were any outages, they went unnoticed.
In 2018, I experienced an issue with a SpamTitan competitor, it was out for around an hour. An outage could have a potentially high impact. Just imagine if you stop the email service to your sales team. Most organizations will survive if they can't use email for an hour, but not all of them. Still, the negative impact will increase with the time of the outage.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
SpamTitan is a cloud solution. They've got a significant customer base worldwide and should have the experience of scaling out and scaling up already.
We have no concerns about scalability. Our existing customers are stable and don't expect a significant increase or decrease at the moment. There are always fluctuations, but we don't foresee significant changes. Our expectation is a gradual increase in the client base and more consumption of the SpamTitan service.
How are customer service and support?
I rate TitanHQ support ten out of ten. We needed help only once, and the issue was resolved in a day.
Our team love the whole experience of partnering with TitanHQ. It's exceptionally smooth. Most of them are of the mindset that they want to respond as soon as possible. Everything is seamless. If any of us need an answer, we just shoot them an email and get what we need after a couple of hours. It's simple, and the billing is sorted out, so I don't have to think about it. Everything is automated, and I've got the correct reports. It's no hassle and a considerably valuable is presented to MSPs and end customers.
How would you rate customer service and support?
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
The only competing solution we used was Mimecast. The technology is fine and it works, but the pricing is prohibitive for some customers. Especially the archiving and the pearl in the crown is the data download from the archive.
Most customers use Mimecast to archive, but it's painful financially to move on from there. Other customers only use M2 due to the reasons above. They're much easier to migrate to SpamTitan. There are many other email archiving solutions, that provide a similar service.
There's no significant difference between SpamTitan and Mimecast from a technology perspective. They probably overlap 90 per cent. There are some minor differences that are insignificant. It wouldn't play a huge role in a customer's decision. However, Mimecast is significantly more expensive for the whole solution.
SpamTitan is stable, and the support is doing its job as expected. We only opened one ticket the last year, and it was sorted during the day. It is a pragmatical decision to move to SpamTitan, considering all the factors.
How was the initial setup?
Setting up SpamTitan is extremely easy. Some customers have the technical knowledge to set SpamTitan up, but in general, they preferer to use an external partner for the implementation. Everything is on the cloud. You only need to tweak a few DNS records and provide the proper training to the end-users.
The deployment is straightforward. Sometimes, we have to help the customer to sort out a mess internally before they can set up our solution. The deployment takes around an hour or two if you only need to update the DNS records. If you've got all the data from the customer and you only have to apply the changes, you need an hour or two. Afterwards, you have a period of initial support where you hold the customer's hand in case something is wrong. Generally, it's straightforward and quick. In the worst-case scenario, it takes 24 hours. The end IT user training may take longer.
One person is usually enough to handle the deployment, but we may require an additional person with experience with the customer's email servers. For instance, they might need specific knowledge of Office 365, Exchange Online, Gmail corporate edition, etc. If there is an issue with a client's email servers, we might assign another person to help if the first one is unfamiliar with the email server technology.
What was our ROI?
Business organisations aren't paying salaries for their IT users to fight spam. Even if each user only spends 15 minutes daily moving all the spam to the junk box, they can multiply that by each workday for the whole year. Any spam solution will cost just a fraction of the payroll wasted.
The time to value depends on the scale of the organization, but a client will probably see a return in the first year. SpamTitan needs to be trained to determine what is good and bad. How long? It depends on the organisation.
In other words, a single customer would need to compare the wasted employee time for the learning period. After that, they don't have any more wasted employee time or at least it is significantly reduced. SpamTitan is sorting out that issue for them for free. It's a huge gain of the work time back on their business.
The benefits start immediately after implementation. IT users can see all the daily reports of how much spam they receive. They've got the control to say, "Release that email," "Allow this email," or "Block this email." They start to teach the system. In the beginning, they're happy to do that, but eventually, they get bored. Fortunately, the system begins to do most of the work itself. After six months, the value is almost at 85 to 95 percent.
After a year, it is close to 100 percent of its value. If you want to use an anti-spam solution, you should expect a minimum of three years before you get a proper return on your investment. The first year is spent making the system aware of what's happening. You've got the real value in the second and the third year. It makes perfect sense when you spread the value across all the years.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
The price of SpamTitan is reasonable and it makes sense. The end customer pays for the license and the professional services to us to set up the whole solution. Usually, it's part of a much bigger project.
What other advice do I have?
I rate SpamTitan a ten out of ten. It's an easy sell. The price is insignificant compared to the money the customer saves. They also have an insurance policy with high protection against reputational risk. It mitigates so many other risks for the organization. A modern organization needs to have spam protection and the overall maturity of the UK market helps to shift the conversation from "Do we need such a solution?" to "What solution is best for us?"
SpamTitan MSP model has adapted well for MSPs to resell the subscription and get the money from the customer to pay it back to TitanHQ. The support is good and quick. SpamTitan does the job and ticks all the boxes from an end-customer point of view and a managed service provider perspective. They deliver real value to both parties.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
Public Cloud
Disclosure: PeerSpot contacted the reviewer to collect the review and to validate authenticity. The reviewer was referred by the vendor, but the review is not subject to editing or approval by the vendor. The reviewer's company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer: MSP