For Brisbane BMW, the key to retaining its title as Queensland's most successful luxury car retailer can be summed up in two words - customer satisfaction. It means using best practice in everything from after sales service to IT. Brisbane BMW, like many other automotive industry retailers, relies on NetBox Blue to provide email and network management and security. The NetBox has become indispensable in controlling spam as well as viruses that have the potential to wreak havoc on the corporate network and erode hard won customer satisfaction.

The Business

Brisbane BMW was set up in 1999 and now sells 2000 cars a year, making it the third largest BMW dealer in Australia. The company won a BMW Excellence award in 2007, their second in the past four years. With plans to open another dealership in Brisbane's western suburb of Darra, the company is on target for another successful year.

The management team at Brisbane BMW is totally focused on giving customers the total Brisbane BMW experience. That means fresh thinking and a professional way of doing business. The company expects the same level of professionalism and fresh thinking from its service providers.

"As a company that prides itself on strong customer service, we like to deal with companies that do so as well and certainly the NetBox Blue team is very good in this area." Martin Roller, Brisbane BMW Managing Director says.

The Situation

Brisbane BMW identified a need to upgrade its email management. Spam was overwhelming the corporate network and slowing down the staff's productivity. Several virus attacks had also previously caused costly problems for the company. Brisbane BMW sought advice from IBM's leading Business Partner, Computer Merchants. The company had no hesitation in endorsing the NetBox.

"For a customer like Brisbane BMW there is only one solution we would recommend and that is the NetBox. Not only does it run on IBM hardware which delivers great reliability and reassurance but we also use the product ourselves. We have been so impressed by the results and the service that we had total confidence in recommending it to Brisbane BMW", Managing Director of Computer Merchants, Norm Jefferies says.

The Solution

The NetBox answered all of Brisbane BMW's needs in one easy to use appliance. The integrated suite of features provides effective spam, malware and virus filtering, a world-class firewall as well as a range of reporting tools.

Most importantly for Brisbane BMW, the corporate network is now totally secure from external threats. The NetBox has given Brisbane BMW complete confidence that those risks have been eliminated.

The appliance is run on an IBM System X server, giving Brisbane BMW true data centre quality hardware with built in resilience and the confidence of IBM onsite support. Other solutions the company considered required faulty appliances to be returned to the manufacturer for repair. This would have exposed Brisbane BMW to potentially catastrophic viruses or internet downtime while the appliance was being repaired.

NetBox Blue's remote management service not only monitors the underlying hardware platform but also performs regular back ups of the customer's configuration settings. This provides total peace of mind for customers.

"Not only is NetBox Blue's product something that we do confidently recommend - their back-up service is also outstanding," Mr Roller says.

The Results

The NetBox uses a unique pre-delivery filtering engine which performs multiple checks on the body of each email before it is downloaded from the internet. Of the 91.25% of email blocked by the NetBox, 89% is blocked at the internet (SMTP) level. This gives Brisbane BMW crucial savings in bandwidth and download costs along with dramatic efficiency savings due to the massive reduction in spam.

Viruses have been dramatically eliminated from the corporate network. In a typical month the NetBox blocks over 250 external virus threats, including several phishing attempts. On top of this the NetBox service also identifies and blocks as many as 10 internal virus threats from spreading.

"Spam emails have been dramatically cut down, in fact at present we eliminate some 20,000 spam emails a month! And since installing the NetBox Blue appliance, we've not had any viruses in our email system whereas we had a few prior to installing the NetBox," Mr Roller says. "Overall, I'd say that what they provide is at the top end in terms of product capability and back-up service but at a moderate level in terms of operation costs. All in all they provide excellent value for money."

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