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Sporting goods retailer The Sports Authority tries a variety of anti-Spam techniques and finds a hosted service is least expensive and most effective.
Like many other companies, The Sports Authority (www.thesportsauthority.com) found a formidable opponent in the form of unsolicited e-mail. And after a series of mergers and acquisitions in 2003, the problem only got worse. That's when the company decided to strike back.
With the help of a hosted service from MX Logic (www. mxlogic.com), The Sports Authority is winning the war against spam-and saving considerable money to boot.
LEAPS AND BOUNDS
The Sports Authority has a long and active history. The company opened its first store in November 1987 in Fort Lauderdale, FL and now has nearly 400 retail outlets in the United States, including Gart Sports, Sportmart, and Oshman's. It also operates an online shopping site via an agreement with GSI Commerce and sells through a joint venture with AEON, which operates about 40 stores in Japan.
Formed via a series of mergers and acquisitions that culminated in its merger with Gart Sports last August, The Sports Authority has become the number-one sporting goods retailer in the United States, according to Hoover's Online (www.hoovers.com).
The company expects its revenues to climb from about $2.3 billion in 2003 to a projected $2.6 billion in 2004. That sort of growth brings smiles to stockholders. In fact, the company was called a "small stock with big potential" by SmartMoney Magazine in October 2003. Such growth can be associated with pitfalls, however, particularly for those charged with consolidating the IT infrastructure of multiple enterprises.
Just ask Joseph Girodo, the group Unix manager responsible for overseeing the e-mail system used by almost 2,000 of the company's 8,500 U.S.-based employees. Girodo serves as The Sports Authority's first line of defense in the battle against unsolicited e-mail.
With spam "basically out of control" after the Gart Sports merger, Girodo knew he needed something stronger than the spam-filtering capabilities native to the company's new e-mail system, Microsoft Exchange/Outlook 2003. After a quick examination of the myriad spam-fighting possibilities available (both hardware and software), the company finally settled on a hosted service that cost only a few bucks a year per user.
The result? The Sports Authority's spam volume has...