The Record - Issue 21: Summer 2021

70 www. t e c h n o l o g y r e c o r d . c om I NT E R V I EW G ood communication between a business and its partners and customers is an essential part of success and growth. But emails sent to customers and partners can have a value beyond the purpose of the message itself. New Zealand-based firm Crossware has built its products on this idea. “Our enterprise offerings enable an organisa- tion’s emails to be on-brand and assist with mar- keting campaigns, and have the ability to track and generate leads,” says Peter Molyneux, gen- eral manager at Crossware. “But mostly, since they are centrally managed, they can also save businesses time and money.” For organisations that do not use an email signature solution like Crossware’s, rolling out changes to email signatures would traditionally require an IT employee to visit every device or ask individuals to update signatures themselves. “This not only introduces the risk of human error, it also takes up a significant amount of time for staff members who may not be famil- iar or confident with making the changes,” says Molyneux. “Even if it takes just half an hour, when you extend that out to every person in the business, it’s a lot of time that they have not spent on their actual job.” While there are many email signature solu- tions available on the market, Crossware has achieved several world-firsts that set it apart from its competition. For example, it has been named Microsoft’s Preferred Solution for Email Signatures. And the reason for this lies partially in the firm’s Email Signature Management for Enterprise Private Cloud, which is hosted in the customer’s own Microsoft Azure infrastructure. “Organisations have moved in their droves from on-premises Exchange boxes where they have to manage, patch and upgrade them, to the cloud where Microsoft manages all that,” says Molyneux. “The Enterprise Private Cloud solution is hosted in Microsoft’s data centres, but instead of it being under our subscription, it is under the customer’s subscription. This gives the customer a level of control and man- agement that they may want for compliance, security and legality reasons. Other customers are happy for us to manage that though, and in that case, we will.” When Crossware came up with its original email signature solution for Office 365 in 2014, it was entering a market where every other prod- uct sent the email fromOffice 365 to the vendor’s cloud, which then sent it onto the recipient. “This can create major problems,” says Molyneux. “If we had implemented that same process into our services, the customer’s email would come to us and we would be responsible to deliver it to the end recipient. We are not our customers or their organisations. That is why it is so important to our customers that we have this ‘closed loop’ approach.” Crossware was the first business to come up with a solution that takes the email from Office 365, passes it through its service, adds the signa- ture, and then routes it back into the customer’s Office 365 infrastructure. “Every other competitor has now basically cop- ied that framework,” says Molyneux. “We were the very first one to come up with this private enterprise solution where the email actually doesn’t go through the Crossware service, it goes through the customer’s own Azure service with the signature solution software in there. We even won an award from Microsoft because of that architecture – the team there loved how we had created that ‘closed loop’ because it protected their customers as well as our own.” Security, compliance and legality are not the only benefits that Crossware delivers to its Crossware’s Peter Molyneux explains how the firm’s email signature solutions ensure communication security, compliance and legality, and how its innovative ‘closed loop’ approach has become an industry standard A world-first for email BY E L LY YAT E S - ROB E R T S