MSP Profile: USA.NET
One way to create a short list of potential messaging partners is to find the innovators in the industry. USA.NET, the largest independent email messaging provider in the world, was the first Messaging Service Provider to offer Web-based email in 1996 — and the first to introduce managed messaging for businesses in 1997. The Colorado-based company, which started out as an Internet Service Provider in 1991 (the same year the World Wide Web was born) today offers email and managed messaging solutions for businesses, service providers and consumers. The company manages more than 11 million mailboxes and processes nearly 200 million messages a month via its patent-pending “message store” technology.
The following is an overview of USA.NET’s current capabilities, from a full range of services to advanced message store technology to sophisticated support tools.
USA.NET Service Offerings
USA.NET offers managed messaging services for five distinct business market segments, along with a consumer email service. Here’s a quick overview:
• USA.NET Professional Messaging is offered to small and mid-size businesses, -delivering a branded email address for every employee (employeename@company-name.com) and a full range of professional, cost-effective email features that allow small businesses to take advantage of all the features provided with “large business communications” at an affordable price.
• USA.NET Enterprise Messaging is a reliable and secure email messaging solution for mid-size and enterprise organizations. USA.NET Enterprise Messaging eliminates the investment and hassle of installing, operating and supporting an in-house email mes-saging system while providing high performance and reliability, exceptional scalability and a full feature set. This allows companies to focus on their core competencies and strategic business developments.
In the coming months, USA.NET plans to add enhanced features to its broad business service line, including virus scanning, calendar functionality, pager notification, faxing and language translation.
USA.NET Message Store Architecture
The company’s advanced message store is based on a highly reliable and scalable distributed architecture that includes advanced features, universal accessibility and a high level of security. Figure 3 gives a visual overview of the USA.NET message store.
Inside its message store, USA.NET relies on best-of-breed hardware and software applications, including its own patent-pending mail engine architecture, routers from Cisco Systems, storage devices from HP, database software from Oracle and servers from HP. The message store network is a 100-megabit fully switched architecture, and switches are trunked together in a Gigabit ring to alleviate single points of failure. Outside the store, OC-3 and DS3-level connections to several leading Internet backbone carriers ensure high bandwidth and diverse-route redundancy.
The USA.NET message store architecture was designed from the ground up to provide maximum performance, high availability, superb scalability and ultimate flexibility. A distributed, multi-threaded design with independent server scaling allows each server to efficiently handle many simultaneous message deliveries and requests. Load-balanced message routing and queuing — along with multiple public and private Internet backbone connections — delivers constant service availability. Scaling is easily accomplished by seamlessly adding new processors. USA.NET also employs a sophisticated server-side filtering process, part of USA.NET’s pending patent, which lets customers create their own rules for how they want their mail to be processed.
USA.NET Support Services
The “managed” in managed messaging requires an MSP to provide robust support and help-desk services. USA.NET operates the industry’s most advanced 120-seat, Web-enabled customer-support center that incorporates the latest e-service technology.
More than 90 percent of USA.NET end user inquiries are handled via Web-based user interfaces. Interactive e-service inquiry tools, online FAQs (Frequently Asked Questions) and online knowledge-based self-help tools mean that the customer usually doesn’t have to leave the Web to get an answer. For those concerns that require live human interaction, USA.NET provides customer support options — toll or toll-free, branded or non-branded telephone support and multi-lingual interactive online support. The company’s customer support center is staffed seven days a week, twelve hours a day.
USA.NET’s Customer Service Representatives (CSRs) offer multifunctional end user support for all branded service offerings. Account Coordinators and dedicated CSRs provide support, training, account set-up and provisioning for the company’s commercial customers. And Technical Support Specialists categorize, troubleshoot and resolve escalated trouble tickets. Trouble tickets are generated via USA.NET’s e-service inquiry tools.