American Century Investments, winner of the CIO 100 award for best IT practices, selects Cloudmark to stop spam and enhance employee productivity
Cloudmark Authority meets high bar for performance and low total cost of ownership requirements for resourceful IT spending
SAN FRANCISCO — Dec. 8, 2003 — Cloudmark™ Inc., today announced that American Century Investments has selected Cloudmark Authority, the award-winning enterprise anti-spam solution, to protect its 1,800 employees from spam, enhancing productivity and saving the company money. American Century, a leading investment manager with 40 years experience and $84 billion in assets under management, chose Cloudmark because its lowest total cost of ownership (TCO) solution is in line with the company's award-winning focus on best IT practices and resourcefulness in IT spending. Cloudmark's first-ever automated spamDNA™ technology delivers spam protection to thousands of businesses including Documentum and Fidelity and was the only solution to meet American Century's high bar for performance and accuracy with low false positives, as well as, the very important low IT impact.
"We almost went with another anti-spam vendor who claims a leadership position in the market. Then we put Cloudmark into production, running hundreds of thousands of emails through it a day and experienced the highest accuracy and best end to end performance," said Bob Slaughter, Manager of IT for American Century. "Cloudmark immediately delivered over 90 percent accuracy and we didn't have to spend money upgrading our gateway machines because Authority was so efficient using less than 5 percent of the machines resources."
American Century is a winner of the prestigious CIO 100 award from IDG's CIO magazine. The 2003 CIO 100 award recognizes organizations around the world that excel in positive business performance through resourceful Information Technology management and practices.
"With a continued focus on best IT practices and business performance, we had to put an end to productivity loss due to spam," said Bob Sauvageau, Senior Vice President & Chief Technology Officer for American Century. "We found Cloudmark delivers the lowest TCO solution and are pleased to be working with them to increase employee productivity and satisfaction."
A leading investment management firm stressing positive business performance and among FORTUNE Magazine's 100 Best Companies to Work for in America, American Century made it a priority to find the most effective anti-spam solution with the lowest TCO to quickly protect its employees from spam, increase their productivity and reduce corporate liability due to offensive spam. Authority is able to deliver on this because its powerful spamDNA is fully automated so that it is easily deployed and only impacts the Mail Transfer Agent (MTA) 5 percent, compared to others at 40 percent. This means American Century did not have to purchase new hardware or waste IT resources configuring Authority, or changing email infrastructure. In addition, Authority operates without a connection to Cloudmark. Other solutions require a constant connection to external servers which entails reconfiguring firewalls in order to update their rules every minute.
"Our goal with Cloudmark's spamDNA technology has been to deliver the most cost effective solution in the industry," said Karl Jacob, CEO for Cloudmark. "It is rewarding to have met the enterprise and IT spending requirements of a company like American Century who has won accolades for their achievements in using IT to gain a competitive advantage."
The firm is shielded by Cloudmark's first-ever automated process of capturing, analyzing and predicting spam to generate powerful spamDNA – a far superior approach to reactive, manual methods used by other anti-spam vendors. Just as scientists predict whether someone will have a particular disease by looking for specific gene mutations, Cloudmark Authority predicts whether a message is spam by looking for specific mutations in message structure called spamGenes. Cloudmark improves Authority's effectiveness by constantly and automatically evolving the spamDNA it gets from SpamNet™, Cloudmark's peer-to-peer (P2P) community of more than 700,000 users collaborating to fight spam. The spam is fed into the Genetic Evolution Engine to automatically generate spamDNA cartridges. These spamGenes are the powerful building blocks for Authority and the reason it only requires updates every 30-60 days (not every few minutes like others) and calls for minimal administrative intervention. Authority evaluates each message in this way, assigning it a confidence level and accessing company messaging policies to determine appropriate routing action, offering IT administrators' optimal flexibility and manageability.
About Cloudmark
Cloudmark builds messaging security software that protects communications service provider networks and their subscribers against the widest range of messaging threats. Only Cloudmark Security Platform™ delivers instant security and control across diverse messaging environments, enabling communications service providers to create a safe user experience, protect revenue and safeguard their brand, while streamlining infrastructure and reducing operational costs. Cloudmark's patented solutions protect more than 120 tier-one customers worldwide, including AT&T, Verizon, Swisscom, Comcast, Cox and NTT.