PARIS -- Equant today announced that its Equant Messaging Protection Suite, a managed Internet e-mail service for protecting multinational businesses from spam, viruses and corporate policy violations, has secured more than 200,000 users globally since its launch in February.

Among the companies using Equant Messaging Protection Suite, or EMPS, are Ampacet, Electrolux, Stride Rite, a major professional services organization, and a leading global food services company.

With recent outbreaks of e-mail-borne viruses and malware increasing the risk to businesses, EMPS can ensure greater than 95 percent elimination of spam. EMPS forms a protective barrier against e-mail threats, using its globally load-balanced data center network to perform multiple layers of spam and virus filtration, thereby allowing only clean data streams to penetrate corporate networks.

Early adopters of EMPS include Electrolux, the world's largest producer of appliances and equipment for kitchen cleaning and outdoor use. EMPS is enabling Electrolux to protect more than 25,000 user mailboxes in Europe, North America and Asia.

"Equant has one of the industry's strongest track records in supporting global corporations," said Laurent De Haas, head of IT Operations, Electrolux IT Solutions AB. "Our spam and virus problem knew no borders, negatively impacting our business operations across the globe. We needed a solution that could seamlessly scale with the growth of the spam epidemic, and EMPS offered the protection we needed to fight back."

"Equant's messaging solution offers peace-of-mind to global enterprises by managing a world class protection service, with quality of service that surpasses what organizations can do with internally managed solutions," said Mark Wigington, vice president of IT Services for Equant. "Customers across the globe continue to rank e-mail protection as one of their primary IT concerns, citing specifically that they cannot expend internal resources to oversee a complicated messaging infrastructure. EMPS, combined with Equant's 50 years of messaging experience, is an ideal solution for multinational enterprises looking to out-task time-consuming messaging management."

EMPS, which is delivered through a partnership with FrontBridge Technologies, also enables multinational businesses to implement an e-mail risk management program, comply with government and industry regulations, minimize corporate liability and guarantee security while vastly reducing the load on internal resources, hardware, software and bandwidth.

EMPS is designed specifically for multinational corporations, built on a global network of eight load-balanced, fully redundant data center peers located in strategic Internet locations. The FrontBridge network is the only one to demonstrate 100 percent historical uptime, ensuring e-mail availability. An outside firm is used to validate the FrontBridge network uptime, and performance is verified each month. Additional service features include multi-engine virus scanning, intelligent message routing and end-user notification interfaces in regional languages, including English, French, German, Italian, Japanese and Spanish.

Equant