Case Study: ShopNBC

ShopNBC, owned in part by GE and NBC, is an upscale shopping network with 2003 sales of $617 million.

Situation

ShopNBC, owned in part by GE and NBC, is an upscale shopping network with 2003 sales of $617 million. The Company employs approximately 1000 employees and has been publicly traded since 1991 (Nasdaq: VVTV). In January 2003, ShopNBC began experiencing record levels of email targeting its employees from brokerage, medical, and insurance advertisements. The shopping network's mail peaked when approximately 3,000 unsolicited spam emails were received during a two hour period. Normally, this happens over a 24-hour period. Complaints to ShopNBC's Computer Support reached record levels. Not only were these spam emails clogging up the employee's mail box and preventing work from getting done, but in some cases employees were simply unable to keep up in deleting them. ShopNBC's Computer Support had to act, and fast.

Solution

After reviewing a number of third parties with enterprise anti-spam solutions, ShopNBC chose Securence for a number of reasons. "The cost of entry was attractive," said Rich Pugh, Exchange Administrator. "One company was going to charge us thousands of dollars a month. We seriously considered paying it until we learned about Securence." Ease-of-use was another factor. The deployment of Securence took little installation time, and was seamless to those it protects, according to Pugh. The accuracy of Securence was another important consideration. "Other available anti-spam software when tested was rejecting legitimate emails as spam at rates of up to 20% (false positives)," said Pugh. "This required a lot of manual labor to sort through the rejected email to find the legitimate ones. When we tested Securence, we found it rejected only a small fraction of a percent of legitimate email as spam." Finally, on-going administration was minimal. "The great thing about using Securence is that it's totally hands free for me," said Pugh. "I don't think about it. I don't worry about it."

Accurate scanning, filtering, and blocking was, of course, key. After immediately deploying Securence, it was discovered through detailed reports that more than 90 percent of ShopNBC's mail was spam. (Securence provides a detailed daily summary report of all incoming mail.)

Overall value of the Securence solution was its accuracy, low monthly cost, ease of deployment, significantly reduced workload on ShopNBC's Computer Support, minimal on-going administration, and heightened security leading to improved employee morale. By selecting Securence, ShopNBC was able to reduce the number of incoming spam by more than 90%.

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