Success Stories
CopperEye Enables Track-and-trace Application on a Massive Scale
New York-based MessageLabs Ltd. can encrypt a customer's email; scan it for offensive language; and track it to see if and when it was delivered. Equally important, MessageLabs can instantly tell a customer the status of every one of the thousands or tens of thousands of emails it has sent, regardless of which of MessageLabs' twelve worldwide data centers the message passed through.
"It's like the concept of Federal Express," says MessageLabs Chief Operating Officer Carmen Carey, which allows a customer to find out "where is my package at any time as it travels the globe." MessageLabs gives its customers the same information about emails which contain important marketing, product, support or other information.
But providing a real-time track-and-trace solution for emails poses a unique challenge because MessageLabs processes three billion emails per month, each of which can have many individual tracking events. Providing near-instant response time for track-and-trace inquiries against those billions of email records is made more difficult since query results must be returned quickly at the same time that millions of new tracking events are being added to the database. Such a solution would normally require a complex and costly relational database architecture which would need to be loaded, tuned, and managed for optimal response times.
However, thanks to CopperEye, MessageLabs is allowing its customers to perform those queries themselves, at a fraction of the cost of servicing the same customer requests through call center or technical support channels.
Messaging Done Big
MessageLabs serves 14,000 clients in 80 countries, providing antivirus and anti-spam scanning, content, image and URL filtering; encryption as well as archiving and business continuity services for email, instant messaging, Web services and HTTP traffic.
Each month, more than six billion business-to-business emails pass through MessageLabs' perimeter filters, which eliminate half as spam or as being incorrectly addressed. Out of the remaining three billion emails, any one customer might ask about the status of any one email at any time. MessageLabs has always captured this tracking data in log files, but answering a customer query about a specific email could take more than a day for customer service representatives using file system utilities to comb through the millions of rows of log data.
As MessageLabs' customer base grew, in late 2005 it began looking for a way to reduce the manual effort required to service track-and-trace inquiries with an ultimate goal of implementing a customer self-service capability. This system allows customers to conduct their own queries through an enterprise portal rather than call the MessageLabs help desk. The goal of this project was to both improve customer satisfaction while reducing the cost and inefficiency of having MessageLabs' customer service representatives manually digging through the log data.
CopperEye: The Only Fit
For each email it processes, MessageLabs captures log information such as the source, destination and ultimate disposition of a message (such as whether it was successfully delivered or quarantined as containing a virus.) MessageLabs thus needed a track-and-trace solution that could provide rapid response time for a large number of simultaneous queries made against huge volumes of data. These queries had to be performed even while a continuous, and large, stream of new entries was being made to the log file as tracking events were being created for new emails being sent or received.
This data is stored in a flat file from which it must be accessed to either answer customers' questions about their email traffic, or for MessageLabs' own tracking and analysis. The traditional approach to developing a track-and-trace solution for this data would have been to load it from the flat file into a relational database or data warehouse for access. However, the enormous data volume along with the need to simultaneously support both loading and fast queries would have been exceedingly costly to achieve with either of these traditional solutions.
To avoid the excessive costs of implementing and maintaining traditional solutions, the MessageLabs project team took a closer look at the specific requirements for their track-and-trace solution. They identified two key characteristics that opened the door to an innovative solution. The first was that all of the log data was historical in nature and could never change once it was created, and therefore did not need the sophisticated transactional processing features of a relational database. The second was the fact that track-and-trace queries are very selective and return only a single row or two of data, so the data aggregation and summary reporting of a data warehouse solution was unnecessary. MessageLabs therefore sought a solution in which the data could be left in its original flat file format and simply indexed for fast query response.
This, however, raised another problem: The indexing technologies available to support such an approach all struggled with the need to support fast query response while simultaneously loading large volumes of new data. =This is where CopperEye's advanced, patent-pending indexing technology delivered its benefits.
"There wasn't another solution in the marketplace even remotely close" to what CopperEye offered, says Carey. "CopperEye is doing the heavy lifting" which allows MessageLabs to deliver up-to-date information about its email processing to customers through its Web portal.
CopperEye Greenwich employs patented indexing technology which makes it possible to achieve fast query response at the same time large volumes of new records are being added to the index. This performance is achieved using low-cost, off-the-shelf servers and without the tuning and ongoing maintenance required for database or data warehouse solutions. And since the data remains in its original log format and location in flat files, there is no need to move, transform, load or otherwise duplicate the data, which can be costly and time-consuming.
As a result, even with the four billion rows of data in MessageLab's log files, and millions of new records arriving every day, user queries can be returned accurately within seconds. Even more remarkable, the simplified and cost-effective solution architecture made possible by CopperEye was implemented in less than four weeks. CopperEye's processing needs are so low it was implementing using servers that had been retired because they lacked the processing power needed for application serving.
Less Reliance on Call Centers
CopperEye Greenwich costs only a small fraction of the price of competing technical approaches, says Carey. The self-service customer queries it made possible also save money by reducing the number of calls to MessageLabs' call centers. "Instead of customers having to call my employees and wait for them to do a query, which costs me time and money and costs the customer time and money, I put the tool directly into their hands," says Carey.
"CopperEye Greenwich has proven to be a perfect fit for us in terms of the business problem we were trying to solve," says Carey. By dramatically reducing the cost of searching billions of records for details about a given email, CopperEye Greenwich gives customers information they can't get anywhere else - and gives MessageLabs the competitive differentiation it values.
About MessageLabs
MessageLabs is a leading provider of integrated messaging and web security services, with over 14,000 clients ranging from small business to the Fortune 500 located in more than 80 countries. MessageLabs provides a range of managed security services to protect, control, encrypt and archive communications across Email, Web and Instant Messaging.
These services are delivered by MessageLabs' globally distributed infrastructure and supported 24/7 by security experts. This provides a convenient and cost-effective solution for managing and reducing risk and providing certainty in the exchange of business information. For more information, please visit www.messagelabs.com.
About CopperEye
CopperEye is a provider of enterprise search software that delivers an order-of-magnitude cost savings for companies needing to capture, store and quickly access business transaction data where the volume is measured in the tens- or hundreds-of-terabytes. This is increasingly important as corporate data volumes more than double every year and government regulations require companies to keep data longer. Using CopperEye, companies are able to improve global business operations and implement more powerful business applications at dramatically lower costs than competing solutions. CopperEye's underlying technology is a new, patented indexing approach that delivers a quantum leap in performance over traditional indexing alternatives. CopperEye has offices in Bath, UK; Stamford, Conn. and San Francisco, Calif., USA.
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