Messaging System for BT Retail Internet Operations

The Challenge

Demand for more sophisticated messaging services has continued to increase as organisations learn more about the capabilities of the Internet and the business opportunities that it creates. This puts pressure on service providers to offer secure and reliable solutions that combine scalability with high performance.

BT Retail Internet Operations was one such service provider, which offered various messaging solutions for both businesses and consumers. A long-standing relationship, during which Nexor developed and supported various X.400 and SMTP messaging systems for BT, meant that, when BT technicians identified the need for a new messaging platform for business customers, they knew it could be built using Nexor products.

Nexor worked with members of BT’s technical division, now known as BTExact Technologies, to develop a new backbone messaging system for BT’s internet services to businesses. The combined expertise of Nexor’s consultants and BTExact’s technicians enabled BT Retail Internet Operations to implement the new system successfully.

The Nexor Solution

The new messaging system supported multiple domains, enabling businesses to extend their brands to emails by selecting unique domain names (for example, an organisation might have up to 20 different name [at] company [dot] com address formats). The same platform could support thousands of other domains.

The system enabled BT to set up individual or group messaging policies for each of its customers, including policies to exclude unsolicited email (spam).

Customers could send and receive large multimedia file attachments. BT considered extending this service to its Broadband offering, still using the Nexor platform. This would have increased the pressure on the system to cope with very large volumes of traffic without impairing speed or performance.

With more businesses operating internationally, and more employees working remotely, there is increased demand for email services to be accessible at any time, from any location and from any device. BT’s business service achieved this.

Highly experienced in solving complex problems in critical messaging environments, Nexor provided BT Retail Internet Operations with several additional management features for the new messaging platform. BT could troubleshoot and resolve any problems, whether on the server or the client, through Nexor Mailer’s granular logging capabilities, which enabled very accurate and detailed logging of messages.

The Result

The rich tool set provided by the architecture gave BT Retail Internet Operations greater flexibility and control, with the ability to enhance and reconfigure its messaging system using a text-based interface as well as a custom-designed graphical user interface (GUI).

Fully scalable and with a smaller footprint than many other leading messaging platforms, the new system delivered greater efficiency and lower costs. It simplified BT Retail Internet Operations’ messaging infrastructure from three platforms to two, reducing the amount of administration and consequently the associated management costs.

The Nexor solution enabled BT to manage secure, reliable and high performance email messaging systems for its business customers, providing them with all the features and benefits of a fully functional messaging system without the risks and costs associated with in-house management of such a system.

The new system supplied 150,000 mailboxes to about 60,000 businesses, with more than one million messages and one million POP3 sessions every day. It enabled BT Retail Internet Operations to make significant improvements to the quality and variety of its services for business clients.

One of the major benefits of the messaging system was its ability to interface with the existing infrastructure. Nexor’s expertise enabled the existing database to be modified, making it more scaleable and more efficient in its handling of authentication requests.

The Response

BT’s Rich Llewellyn said:

BT Retail Internet Operations has been a Nexor client for many years, running its critical Business ISP service on a Nexor platform. The ISP industry relies on exceptionally high service availability and BT Retail Internet Operations is delighted with the support it receives from Nexor, which enables it to perform to the high standards demanded.

It is the combination of superior technical ability and customer attitude that ensures BT Retail Internet Operations' Customer Service experience with Nexor is excellent. The first point of contact with Nexor is with the Customer Service desk (available 24 x 365), where the initial response is typically calm and collected with an emphasis on understanding the nature of the problem and, most importantly, the impact on BT‘s business. Once first-line support has taken stock of the situation, fast action is always taken to optimise the appropriate technical experts, whom BT Retail Internet Operations regard as top of their class. Where a problem is serious, Nexor has always provided immediate action to reduce its severity, whether during the day or night.

Once the experts are at work, Customer Service continues to monitor the progress of the resolution and provides regular updates to BT, thus ensuring that expectations and contingency action can be managed correctly. In addition to the on-demand service, monthly audits and reviews help to optimise service and performance.

All in all, BT Retail Internet Operations has been exceptionally pleased with the support and maintenance service provided by Nexor over the years and credits Nexor with assisting in the provision of a high-availability, high-reliability platform for its business customers.