Spam is irritating for every individual, but for a company, it's even more annoying. By eating up bandwidth, user time, and business resources, the scourge of the Internet is something every company needs to fight. New York City-based NetWave, maker of anti-spam services, is fighting the good fight. Founder Paul Hodara chats about the battle.
Why do you think there's a need for your services?
I like to think that in the not-too-distant future, all of mankind's knowledge and creativity will be accessible effortlessly to anyone, anywhere. It is very empowering for mankind, but at the same time somewhat risky. With these capabilities, there is tremendous potential for abuse. I think it is important to be able to eliminate or at least minimize the abuse of unlimited access to electronic data without hampering the freedom of access.
Rather than being victimized by Internet hazards, companies are realizing that effective solutions exist to protect them. NetWave is at the cutting edge of these solutions, protecting its clients with specialized security technology and a customized solution to fight spam.
How is the company unique in the marketplace?
The underlying mission of NetWave is to work more directly with clients and customize local-area and wide-area network solutions to their needs. As the Internet became increasingly accessible to corporate environments, we began offering Internet connectivity and security solutions. Currently, NetWave's services include network design and implementation consulting, specialized e-commerce and business-to-business hosting services, business continuity services and systems, and anti-spam services.
How did you develop your anti-spam strategy?
When we first became interested in providing anti-spam solutions, we looked at both 'product' and 'service' models. We discovered that with a product or appliance, there were many hidden costs such as maintenance, training, redundancy and especially keeping the technology current. As technology evolves, so does the abuse of technology.
We realized early on that if we could create a service infrastructure that could serve many clients, we could add features and capabilities, such as full redundancy, by using multiple backbone providers and redundant data centers, etc. The cost of doing this is a shared cost, making it affordable for individual clients. In addition, adhering to our mission statement of customized client-based solutions, we needed to develop the ability to customize each client's environment to their specific needs. We have achieved this with our anti-spam gateway services.
How is the company faring in the current economic climate?
In a sense, we profit from harsh economic times, because customers are more careful about how they spend their money. They pick and choose their solution providers, and they gravitate toward our company because we provide custom-tailored solutions, while our larger competitors can only take a cookie-cutter approach with off-the-shelf products that often cannot address a business's unique needs.
Do you have anything in the works for the future?
Yes, on a limited basis we have already rolled-out our disaster recovery, and business continuation services. These services provide small- to medium-size businesses off-site hot backup: Data can be accessed immediately from anywhere securely through a Virtual Private Network.
What are the largest challenges that you see in providing your service?
The largest challenge in any service we provide is in maintaining a consistent level of quality. Quality, for me, includes reliability, effectiveness, and cost control. Clients need to be able to count on our systems working effectively and consistently because their day-to-day business operations depend on that. A challenge we face in our anti-spam work is that, as we implement new abuse defense systems, abusers also develop new methodologies to overcome them. So we are constantly evolving our solutions to surpass theirs.
do you know a New York company we should cover? Let us know about it. Send your local profile candidates to emillard@computeruser.com.
