In the Vastness of Northern Ontario, it takes Teamwork and a Roaring Penguin to win the Battle against Spam

Published 6th April 2009

With offices in Sudbury and North Bay, Northern Voice and Data provides true managed services to hundreds of small and medium-sized businesses across the vast geography of northern Ontario.

Ed Donaldson is Northern Voice's Manager of Technical Services. “As a Managed Service Provider, we believe in providing “wall-out” solutions for our customers.” A major problem almost everywhere is spam. With more clients having spam problems all the time, Ed and his team initially planned for an internal solution. However, through word of mouth, they heard about Roaring Penguin Software's line of CanIt anti-spam products and contacted Bill White, Roaring Penguin's VP Sales and Marketing.

Bill set them up with a demo of the CanIt-PRO package and the results were both impressive and instantaneous. “After the torrent of spam, it was like turning off a tap!” exclaims Donaldson.

Another huge bonus of utilizing CanIt to fight spam was Roaring Penguin's partnership with Level Platforms. As a vendor partner of Level Platforms, Roaring Penguin's CanIt spam trap has been included in Level Platforms' Managed Workplace monitoring software. Donaldson continues, “We were already using Level Platforms, so it made perfect sense to make CanIt our recommended anti-spam solution.”

Northern Voice and Data have been steadily rolling out CanIt-PRO to their clients now for the last year and the list of satisfied customers utilizing CanIt‑PRO's capabilities as part of their Managed Service contract is growing.

Leveling the Playing Field for Managed Service Providers

Since Level Platforms' start-up in 2003, the Ottawa-based company has become one of the world's top providers of Managed Service software. Their package, Managed Workplace, allows Service Providers and resellers to monitor their end customer's IT infrastructure. Ryck Marciniak, Director of Vendor Alliances at Level Platforms, proudly says "Our company has grown from 41 to 131 employees in the last three years. A big reason for that is the wide array of third-party products we support."

Among this list are very recognizable names in the IT field including Cisco, Oracle, Apple, Intel, Microsoft, IBM and now, Roaring Penguin and it's award-winning CanIt-PRO anti-spam software. In all, Level Platforms' monitoring software supports over 300 products by 83 different vendors.

Ryck notes how simple it was to integrate CanIt into their Managed Workplace package, "Integrating the Roaring Penguin stuff was easy. We take advantage of CanIt's syslog messaging for the events. Our policy module allows our package to monitor CanIt software running on Windows and Linux servers, as well as the Roaring Penguin supplied CanIt-PRO Appliance."

A Well-Informed Client is a Happy Client

With a diverse clientèle, spread over such a large geographic area the Northern Voice and Data team must be able to quickly and accurately triage, diagnose and fix problems. Using the Level Platforms monitoring package with Roaring Penguin's CanIt, they can provide clients with regular updates and hard data about their network's health and possible improvements.

Donaldson elaborates, “Our clients want us to have our finger on the pulse of their networks. Roaring Penguin and Level Platforms play a big part in that. We assign new clients a primary sales rep so they always have one route to contact. This sales rep becomes more of a consultant in this case, meeting with the clients a few times per year and utilizing the data provided through monitoring in those meetings.”

In summary

CanIt allows Managed Service Providers like Northern Voice and Data to sleep at night. It's 98%-plus efficiency and low administrative overhead, and capacity to be managed by monitoring software such as Level Platforms' Managed Workplace takes the headache out of managing anti-spam.