Customer stories are almost always good to hear; they can provide insight into how and why things are done a certain way, expose details on how challenges are overcome, and even describe why certain vendors and technologies are selected over others.

During the IBM Edge conference, live from Orlando, FL, theCube was able to capture a number of customer stories, including a session hosted by Wikibon analysts John McArthur and David Floyer in which they engaged with Tim Harvey, CEO of Perimeter E-Security, both an IBM customer and partner. Given that Perimeter E-Security’s main line of business provides a variety of secure managed email services in the Cloud, McArthur and Floyer naturally focused the discussion on the areas of secure email, archiving, and compliance.

Harvey described Perimeter E-Security’s value proposition as one that provides “more secure and reliable email services for mid to large enterprises at 50 percent less than the cost of managing the service in-house.” Harvey delivers on this value proposition by moving beyond basic email hosting and simple email archiving to a business solution that provides hosted email or hosted exchange services surrounded by a complete set of security and compliance capabilities such as email hygiene, encryption, and archival. The firm even has plans to bring an email-oriented DLP solution to market in the future.

Sticking with the customer stories, Harvey named a few of Perimeter E-Security’s own clients, including United Airlines, Farmers Insurance, and Chick-fil-A. “In the government space, we focus primarily on local and state institutions,” said Harvey. “For example, we manage 58,000 employees for the state of Oregon.”

Harvey was drawn to the IBM Edge conference as his company has made significant investments in IBM technology to enable its services, especially on the storage side. Harvey said that the conference had been good so far. “We’ve been able to talk to other customers and to get a view into where IBM is heading,” said Harvey, whose firm leverages its strategic partnership to influence IBM’s roadmap, which, in turn, gives both companies a strong competitive advantage in the marketplace. “We will add 100,000 new users this year – roughly 10,000 new users per month. We need to be able to scale as they come on board, provisioning for our customers almost in real-time. We can meet this demand as we get our orders shipped in a preconfigured fashion in a matter of 1-2 weeks,” said Harvey.

When asked by Floyer what drove Perimeter E-Security to select IBM as a partner, Harvey quickly pointed to IBM’s infrastructure solution set and their comprehensive services offerings. “IBM is capable of helping us to define and implement the most appropriate topology and architecture, doing so with a lot more flexibility than the other vendors evaluated,” said Harvey.

“We deliver one of the most critical applications to the business – EMAIL,” added Harvey. “100 percent reliability and 100 percent uptime are two things that have to be guaranteed to the customers. Not just security, but reliability as well. We need to be able to implement both active/active [and] active/passive solutions, based on the business need.” Perimeter E-Security sees the bundling of hardware, software, and storage in preconfigured fashions as a fantastic opportunity for penetration and growth in the email security and compliance market.