Third Party Service Provider Outage Causes Leading Video Game Marketing Firm to Lose Email Service
Reverb Communications Scores With MessageOne’s EMS to Restore Access to Email
Background
Reverb Communications is a leading “boutique” video game marketing agency, with expertise in marketing, sales and public relations. Based in the small Northern California town of Twain Harte, Calif., Reverb Communications’ clients include Red Octane, whose video game, Guitar Hero, was nominated by GameStop.com for five “Best of 2005” awards. The Reverb team is a dynamic group of professionals bringing together years of expertise working with technology, consumer electronics, talent booking, event production, and the health care industry.
Situation
As a marketing firm in the fast-paced video gaming arena, Reverb Communications must be responsive to its clients and readily available via email, to serve its high profile clients and entertainment talent around the world. Because of its small size, Reverb Communications outsources its email and messaging system through a local Internet service provider.
Normally, this arrangement suits Reverb just fine and keeps resources focused on the firm’s marketing agenda – but, when the service provider experienced an outage, Reverb’s business came to a near screeching halt. The firm’s email was down for 24 hours – cutting them off from essential client communications, including several critical emails exchanging information about high stakes deal with a client pursuing a public offering.
Solution
When their email went down, Reverb Communications’ IT manager Tony Carrillo immediately contacted MessageOne to determine if its EMS (Email Management Services) Email Continuity could help resolve the situation.
Since MessageOne is a managed service provider, it was able to quickly deploy and activate EMS Email Continuity for the busy marketing firm, providing access to a fully integrated standby email system when Reverb’s Microsoft Exchange® primary email system failed. As a result, Reverb Communications employees were able to continue sending and receiving critical information over their regular email accounts via web mail, even during the third party service provider’s outage.
During the service provider’s outage, MessageOne’s EMS provided all employees with full email, contacts and calendar entries. With EMS, Reverb Communications is assured that its email never bounces and that its email system outages are never evident to the outside world.
When Reverb’s email messaging system was restored by its third party service provider, the email messages sent during the outage were easily and accurately integrated back into the primary messaging system, thanks to MessageOne.
During normal operation, EMS encrypts and synchronizes important information from Reverb’s primary Exchange email environment to world-class top-tier datacenters around the world. EMS is architected to minimize bandwidth usage and ensure data security. Unlike other high availability solutions, EMS is immune to database corruption and Windows viruses. Its unique Linux-based architecture offers immunity to virtually all of the threats facing email systems including hardware failures, infrastructure problems, network outages, power loss, database corruption and Window’s viruses
Now, with EMS and MessageOne, Reverb Communications has guaranteed email continuity, no matter what the cause. For a small video game marketing firm this has definitely proven to be a win-win situation.
View a PDF version of the Reverb Communications Case study.
