StrongMail Systems, a vendor of on-premise products for marketing and transactional e-mail, has announced that it is has expanded its channel program with four VAR partners. New IBM Premier Business Partners include Direct Systems Support, PCPC Direct and Yorel Integrated Solutions (News - Alert), while CRM VAR and system integrator Lexnet Consulting Group has also signed an agreement to resell StrongMail's e-mail marketing platform.

 

These latest IBM (News - Alert) reseller partnerships are seen by company officials as "strengthening" StrongMail's reach in regional markets. Based in Southern California, DSS is an IBM Premier Business Partner of more than ten years. As part of the partnership, DSS is launching an IBM Mobile Data Center that uses StrongMail's e-mail marketing technology.

 

An IBM Premier Business Partner based in Houston, PCPC Direct sells products and service to Fortune 1000 companies headquartered in the U.S. and Europe and SMBs located throughout Texas. Founded in 1993 and based in Charlotte, Yorel sells customized information technology products "that focus on business problems first," Yorel officials say.

 

Lexnet Consulting Group is a system integrator and reseller of CRM business products based in San Francisco, with an additional office in Southern California. "We've seen a lot of demand from our CRM customers for an e-mail marketing product we can integrate with their internal systems," said Steve Chipman, CEO of Lexnet Consulting Group.

 

Last month StrongMail, extrapolating data from the January 2008 Forrester Research (News - Alert) report titled "E-Mail Marketing Trends," deduced that the British public is annually inundated with 250 billion e-mails.

 

Forrester also found that a good 60 percent-plus of e-mails received by the British public are unrelated to work or personal life and are deleted before they are read. This reporter wonders, of course, how the content is determined of an e-mail which is deleted before being read. But then again, this reporter wonders many things.

 

These findings have prompted some in the industry to call for tighter self-regulation and control by the firms responsible for the unwanted e-mail, StrongMail officials say.

 

Paul Bates, UK managing director of StrongMail, says the scale of the problem is "costly for everyone. UK Marketing departments face bills of £100,000's to send e-mails that are never read, while the public is wasting millions of hours trolling through and deleting them."

 

The research found two-thirds of the British public delete most e-mails before reading them. For U.K. firms who's marketing departments pay e-mail service providers on a "per message" basis, this is a costly exercise, StrongMail officials contend rather reasonably.