73.. That’s Smaller Than 90, Right?

The company that is essentially poaching my big client from me, despite how messily they handled the work we outsourced to them in November, got the client to switch spam (and virus) mail scanning solutions.  They patched Exchange without regard for the presence of Sybari Antigen & Spam Manager, which you’d think would play better with Exchange now that they are both Microsoft products, but this is Microsoft we’re talking about.

That caused havoc, the solution to which was removing and reinstalling Sybari.

Clever.  They are, after all, large and capable enough to know what would happen.  Well, no.  From what I have seen, they aren’t nearly as competent at the hands-on level as the owner is at sales.  He could almost be in the monorail business.  Which I guess makes me Marge Simpson?  Anyway, it presented a golden opportunity to get the client to abandon Sybari, which they weren’t completely happy with anyway because it had only been catching about 90% of the spam, for an external scanning service.

The manager was all enthused when it first turned on last week, touting it to the staff as stopping 85% of spam.  Amusing, since they never considered 85% good enough.

But wait!  I could see that Sybari was trapping a substantial amount that was getting through App River.  It worked out to an average of at least three spams per day per person.  How unfortunate that I was supposed to remove Sybari to avoid future conflicts, but really, why should there be any need to filter for spam twice?

Flash forward.  Perhaps my e-mail is not representative, but 30 spams total in a 24 hour period, with 22 filtered and 8 getting through… Wow, 73 percent!

Not good.  For what it’s worth, I had been getting about three per day.

Cost-wise it’s roughly a tossup.  The new service costs for two years about what Sybari’s two year license plus 24 hours of my time would cost.  In a problem-free environment I might be able to come in under that time.  But the point is that it’s all taken care of by someone else, and I can see the appeal.  The difference is that I looked into what the best product of its kind was reputed to be and got them using that.  The other company got them using a service on which it is a reseller and makes an entertainingly large and spurious setup fee, but that fills a perceived need.  I won’t be surprised if they go forward being officially happy despite getting more spam, because otherwise the emperor has no clothes and they erred.  And if they do complain, it’ll be to somebody else.

1. What is the saying?  you can lead a horse to water but you can’t make it drink? or something like that.
   Silly how a good sales person can make you think your getting a bargin by paying more for less.

   Posted by wayne  on  03/19  at  11:25 PM  from  ohio
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