The Cobalt Group™ Partners with Mailtrust to Provide Hosted Email to 15,000 Automotive Retailers Nationwide

Overview

The Cobalt Group, based in Seattle, Washington, is the e-business leader for the automotive retail industry. Cobalt works exclusively with the automotive retail market to help manufacturers and dealers maximize their overall operating efficiencies and profits. Cobalt's clients include 70 of the top 100 largest dealer groups in the U.S. The company is the only software technology provider ever endorsed by the National Automobile Dealers Association (NADA®) and 18 auto manufacturers, including:

• Acura
• Audi
• Daimler Chrysler
• General Motors
• Honda
• HUMMER

• Hyundai
• Infiniti
• Jaguar
• Kia
• Lexus
• Mitsubishi

• Nissan
• Saturn
• Subaru
• Toyota
• Volkswagen
• Volvo Trucks

The Challenge

As a provider of e-business technology to the automotive retail industry, The Cobalt Group creates and maintains a front- and back-end web presence for over 15,000 auto retailers throughout the United States. In early 2002, Cobalt realized its car dealers needed a business email system to check and send email using the same domain name that the dealership uses for its website. "Many of our dealers were still using AOL or Yahoo accounts for business purposes," explained Matt Muilenburg, Director of Business Development for Cobalt.

While analyzing potential business strategies for successfully launching an email hosting service, Cobalt explored the possibility of building and maintaining the service in-house, but was overwhelmed by the daunting challenges that option presented. Instead, Cobalt decided that outsourcing would provide the most scalable solution while improving their implementation and time-to-market goals. They determined that the growing complexities behind building and maintaining an email system protected from spam, computer viruses, and denial of service attacks would consume too many internal resources, resulting in higher pass-through costs to their customers.

Cobalt began its search for a vendor that specialized in private-label email hosting. They needed to offer a secure email system while maintaining their customer relationships and brand identity.

The Opportunity

In selecting a long-term, strategic email hosting partner, Cobalt took many steps to ensure partnership success. "Our requirements were very stringent," explained Muilenburg. "We needed a partner that offered a highly secure, reliable email system." Cobalt also needed a vendor that would allow them to integrate an email hosting platform and administrative control panel with their own proprietary technologies. A chief concern with an outsourced email hosting platform was that they did not want their customers to have to log into separate websites and control panels to administer their Cobalt applications and third party email accounts. They were also in search of a partner that would allow them to provide a small number of email accounts across thousands of domains. "We really needed a company that would work with our every demand, and those of our customers," added Muilenburg. "Mailtrust was the clear choice at the end of our evaluation process."

The Response

Mailtrust specializes in equipping service providers with private-label email hosting with integrated security threat prevention. In order to facilitate all of Cobalt's requirements, however, Mailtrust needed to provide them with a method of tightly integrating their existing customer management and provisioning interface with the Mailtrust email account provisioning tools. To accomplish this, Mailtrust developed Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) using a mixture of XML and SOAP technologies, allowing Cobalt's software to make calls directly to the Mailtrust control panel. Cobalt also needed a private-label interface for their customers to administer their email services and check their mail. Through MotorPlace.com, Cobalt customers with proper permissions can add, delete, and modify email accounts in real time.

The Solution

Mailtrust provides Cobalt customers with email accounts accessible from MotorPlace.com. Dealers are able to check their email via the web or through desktop clients such as Microsoft Outlook and Outlook Express. "Our customers now have the ability to access their own private label email via the web, from work or home," emphasized Muilenburg. "The dealers are excited about the improved communication afforded by the Mailtrust powered email solution. And despite having their email addresses on thousands of business cards and posted on various websites, they are not flooded with spam. They get the questions from their prospects and return answers with efficiency. In this business, better communication equals greater success."