Akbit Partner Story
It’s a pleasure listening to Robert Wlodarczyk talk about Cryoserver. Whether he’s describing the product itself, or how it’s helped his business, he’s equally enthusiastic. He uses words like “brilliant” and “amazing”, and says “we are big fans of this technology”. This is because, in addition to distributing our product, he employs it as a work tool on a daily basis.
Robert is Sales & Technical Director of AKBIT, a value-added distributor of advanced IT security solutions based in Warsaw, Poland. Established in 2003, AKBIT works with five vendors including us, providing Cryoserver to value added resellers (VARs) in Poland and Eastern European countries.
Before 2010, AKBIT partnered with a rival email archiving vendor, Barracuda, and had a good relationship with the vendor’s product manager, Steve. When Steve left Barracuda to join us, Robert and his colleagues were open to consider our solution.
Robert becomes a Cryoserver convert
From Steve, Robert learned about Cryoserver’s reliability and security – how it gives each email a digital signature and encrypts the storage.
“We were impressed from the very beginning,” he says.
AKBIT were particularly taken with Cryoserver’s search capabilities:
“So much faster than other products,” Robert says, “and easy for any end user. It was amazing.
“The speed of the product and the security were key. We recognised Cryoserver as a very interesting product. We were thinking about email archiving as an important part of our offering to Poland and surrounding countries. We recognised that Cryoserver was a much better solution than what Barracuda offered, with unique features and technology. It was brilliant.”
So, in October 2010, AKBIT and Cryoserver became partners.
Benefiting from Cryoserver’s huge growth potential
“Originally, we thought about Cryoserver mainly for the financial sector and insurance companies,” Robert says. Compliant email archiving is essential for this heavily regulated sector.
Then, he continues: “After starting to work with Cryoserver, we recognised that every single market area is a potential customer. There is the same level of need in all sectors.”
Jumping forward to the present, AKBIT’s reseller partners now have Cryoserver customers in finance, insurance, pharma, legal, manufacturing, construction, and even government. Customers range in size from 10 employees up to 6,000.
“While customers were originally using the on-premise version, most of our projects now with partners involve the cloud solution. Customers are rebuilding their infrastructures, removing their on-premise data centres and moving to cloud.”
A handy business-productivity tool
Robert knows from his own experience that Cryoserver is much more than a secure way to store emails. It has other benefits, too, for anyone in any organisation, which is why he and his AKBIT colleagues use it themselves.
“We started using it in 2012 and can’t imagine working without it. It’s a solution for everyday usage. I don’t bother searching for things in my Outlook because Cryoserver is more precise and faster and I can use more advanced search options.
“At first we were using Cryoserver software on a virtual machine on premise. Two years ago though, we decided to migrate to the cloud version, and have now uploaded all our data to it. The cloud version is perfect.”
Helping Poland’s businesses to be compliant
While GDPR applies to all businesses and organisations throughout EU member states, different countries and industries have different data privacy laws and email retention regulations.
Robert says: “Some sectors are required to keep digital data for five years, others for three years. Telcos have to keep it for 10 years. Some sectors are still not regulated. Mostly, it’s down to the individual company’s policies.”
Reassuringly, Cryoserver meets all customers’ compliance requirements in Poland and in AKBIT’s other Eastern European markets. This includes “right to be forgotten” requests under GDPR.
Why VARs are attracted to Cryosrever
Robert says AKBIT’s partners are always interested to hear about technology that addresses security, compliance and reporting, and is easy to implement and use:
“Sellers who understand the importance of these are very open to seeing the product. We offer them a live demo and events for end-customers. The live demo is important. Once they see it, they’re convinced that Cryoserver is perfect for their customers. We always have positive reactions from partners at the end of every Cryoserver presentation.
“Of course, pricing and discounts are relevant too. We reassure our partners that their margin is fully protected when we sign the deal with them.”
Beating the competition
Cryoserver frequently comes up against rival email archiving vendors in AKBIT’s market - competitors such as Mailstore, GFI, EMC, and Veritas Enterprise Vault.
Robert says: “We are beating them because of Cryoserver’s product quality and features and its security.”
He also credits our licensing for helping his partners to win new business: “Cryoserver licensing is great - better than that of many competitor products,” he says.
Customers only need to pay for active users, not dormant accounts such as those of former employees. Yet our solution will still archive these inactive, unpaid-for accounts. Sometimes there is a big difference between the number of active and dormant accounts. Consequently, Robert says, “Many customers are extremely satisfied with this cost reduction.”
Also, they appreciate that, unlike other archiving providers, Cryoserver doesn’t restrict how much data, within reason, a user archives in a given year. This saves customers money. Robert says that these savings, combined with security, ease of use and speed of search, give Cryoserver an edge over its rivals.
Working with AKBIT and a reseller partner, Cryoserver beat Veritas Enterprise Vault to become the Bank of Lithuania’s email archiving provider.
“We have 100% customer satisfaction”
“We work closely with partners and customers,” says Robert. “After installation, we check that everything is OK with everyone. We ask them how they find the product and if they find it useful.
“One hundred per cent of customers say ‘yes’; Cryoserver has saved their lives in some way - for example, helping them find specific mail, or reinstall data after a mail server crashed, or helping someone in management to find data they were looking for relating to a former employee who left the company two years before.”
With all his VAR partners’ customers, big and small, Robert says: “None have negative opinions about Cryoserver.”
Supporting AKBIT’s partners and customers
When people need support from Cryoserver, Robert knows he and they can count on us. Two examples spring to mind:
“In the past, a customer said they were having a problem with processing emails. Cryoserver Support discovered that those emails had a very strange date format – this was why the software didn’t recognise them. Cryoserver Support enabled the customer to create their own format so that the software could recognise it. The problem was solved in 20 minutes. The customer was surprised that a non-standard case could be solved in such a short time.”
Robert mentions another occasion, when a customer needed an update:
“Our AKBIT Support asked Cryoserver Support for help. And Cryoserver responded immediately. The customer was amazed that they didn’t have to wait for a week or so.
“The quality of Cryoserver Support is brilliant. The guys working there are so prepared for this role. They know the product well. They don’t need to look into the documentation. They are able to help in any case, and they’re very helpful in the more complicated implementations.”
Looking ahead
“I don’t think there is anything that Cryoserver needs to do to improve. They have a roadmap and they are doing a really great job in the planning of the product. For us, the product is perfect in terms of future implementation and how stable it is.”
Partner with Cryoserver
Are you a VAR, or a distributor outside the UK? If you’d like to see Cryoserver in action and discuss growing your business with our email archiving solution, we’d be delighted to hear from you.
Email Robin Bingeman: robin@cryoserver.com.
Or call Robin on 1-866-894-9752
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