Copyright © Webroot Inc. » January 2014 1

BACKGROUNDMarathon Consulting was founded in 2002 to help small and medium-sized businesses optimize effi ciency through innovative IT consulting and solutions. It works with clients from diverse sectors of industry, including entertainment, construction, fi nance, staffi ng, manufacturing, new media, public relations, non-profi t, journalism, retail, real estate and interior design. The company’s motto is “Think about your business, not your network.” Marathon’s ongoing clients trust their IT investment to its experienced team of engineers, and are able to put their focus back into achieving their core business goals.

“Working with the Webroot sales team, it’s very clear that Webroot gets us. They get it. They get the industry. They get MSP. They get their customers, and that’s really rare. They understand what it takes to make us successful, make us happy, and thus make them more successful.”

Brian Kingsley, Director of Services, Marathon Consulting

THE CHALLENGEMarathon Consulting’s relationship with antivirus solutions has evolved over the years; in its early days as a traditional break-fi x IT shop, the company tended to see antivirus products as commodities, with little to differentiate one vendor’s offering from another. But that point of view gradually began to change about six years ago, as Marathon transitioned into a managed services provider (MSP).

“Initially we had just been reselling AV; it had to be OK, it needed to be effective, but we thought of it as a generic sort of thing. When we shifted into being an MSP we actually gave AV solutions away for free, as part of our managed plan.” recalls Brian Kingsley, Marathon’s Director of Services. “It was after AV was added to our services plan, and we became more proactive and more MSP-centric as a company, that we really saw the direct results of having a bad antivirus solution.”

Marathon ConsultingMarathon Consulting Dramatically Reduces TCO, Increases Automation with Webroot SecureAnywhere

AT A GLANCE

Vertical » Managed Service Provider

Year Founded » 2002

Director of Services » Brian Kingsley

BEFORE » Machine rebuilds needed 2-3 times

per month » AV solution missed hundreds of

malware threats » Required constant antivirus updates » Spent weeks rolling out AV solution

AFTER » Many more viruses/malware caught, far

fewer rebuilds » No-defi nition model scans in a few minutes » Rolled out to 1100 machines in less than

2 hours » Saved over 500 hours/year in billable

technician time

WEBROOT CUSTOMER CASE STUDY » MARATHON CONSULTING

2 Copyright © Webroot Inc. » January 2014

CASE STUDY MARATHON CONSULTING

Kingsley explains, “Once we moved from reseller to MSP, it didn’t even matter to our clients what software we have because they’re buying Marathon. If we make a bad choice, it’s Marathon’s fault. Customers would ask, ‘What am I paying you for? Aren’t you supposed to prevent this?’”

The drawbacks of poor AV solutions go beyond customer dissatisfaction; they also entail significantly higher total cost of ownership (TCO) by needing more technician hours to deploy and manage the solution, as well as remediate any infected computers. It took us about 100-120 hours of our engineers’ time to roll out AV to 1,000 computers. Of those, we averaged two to three machine rebuilds a month just because of viruses,” grimaces Kingsley.

THE SOLUTIONMarathon knew it needed a more suitable solution, ideally one that would be compatible with the firm’s plans for the future. According to Kingsley, “About 3 1/2 years ago we began a full-court press of intense focus on company growth, on managed services and automation. We brought on LabTech around that time, started really analyzing our tools and realized that automation was going to be a very important factor for us. And that’s when we began talking to Webroot.”

Impressed by the lightweight Webroot® client agent and sophisticated automation features, Marathon chose Webroot SecureAnywhere® Business Endpoint Protection as its new AV solution. Kingsley was immediately struck by the fast deployment: “Our sister company, Stack Advisors, has been working on Webroot integration with LabTech, and that experience enabled some automation that helped us roll out Webroot to about 1,100 machines in three days, 100 percent done.

“It rolled out so fast. I spent an extra 30 minutes just to make sure it really worked, because it seemed too good to be true. I’d have to say, no exaggeration, this is the fastest vendor software that I’ve used to roll out and to manage so far. It’s very rare that I get excited about a vendor anything. Vendors usually cause me to spend more time on something rather than save me time.”Brian Kingsley, Director of Services, Marathon Consulting

Was the security aspect of the Webroot product similarly impressive? “We dramatically decreased the amount of virus issues that we deal with. Now we’re doing maybe one machine rebuild every couple of months, compared with the 2-3 per month we had to do with our old AV solution. In the first month, we eliminated around 200 different viruses on 100-200 machines that were previously infected while running the old AV solution. It was surprising that immediately upon rollout we were getting flooded with alerts.”

RESULTSKingsley is acutely aware that the TCO of an AV solution is far more important than its trivial purchase price. As he puts it, “How much time is my team going to spend rolling it out? How much time are they going to spend fixing problems it’s causing, and how much time are they going to spend just installing it when the scripts failed to install, or uninstalling it when it’s causing a problem with something else, as well as just general day-to-day management, cleaning up viruses and stuff?

“Up until Webroot, it’s ust been an ongoing process of finding a new vendor whenever software gets too heavy. We’ve had Vipre, ESET, Malwarebytes Corporate, HitmanPro as well.

Since rolling out Webroot, Kingsley estimates he’s saving 10 hours a week (or about 520 hours per year) because his AV technician no longer has to deal with the licensing problems, reinstallations and lengthy antivirus scans imposed by his previous AV solutions. Beyond Webroot’s dramatically lower TCO, Kingsley also values the increased performance that Webroot’s customers have reported. But perhaps most telling is his opinion of Webroot the company:

“A lot of these other companies say they get it, but they have no clue. They’re still operating off ancient billing models, and their antivirus engines are just revamped versions of something they created 20 years ago. Webroot really seems to get it and it shows on all sides—the sales process, the support side, the product itself.”

© 2014 Webroot Inc. All rights reserved. Webroot, SecureAnywhere, and Webroot SecureAnywhere are trademarks or registered trademarks of Webroot Inc. in the United States and/or other countries. Microsoft, Windows, Windows Vista, and Internet Explorer are trademarks or registered trademarks of Microsoft Corporation in the United States and/or other countries. Mozilla and Firefox are registered trademarks of the Mozilla Foundation. All other trademarks are properties of their respective owners.

About WebrootWebroot is bringing the power of cloud-based software-as-a-service (SaaS) to Internet security with its suite of Webroot SecureAnywhere® offerings for consumers and businesses, as well as offer-ing its security intelligence solutions to cybersecurity organizations, such as Palo Alto Networks, F5 Networks, Corero, Juniper, and others. Founded in 1997 and headquartered in Colorado, Webroot is the largest privately held Internet security organization based in the United States – operating globally across North America, Europe and the Asia Pacific region. For more information on our products, services and security visit: www.webroot.com, the Webroot Threat Blog: http://blog.webroot.com or Webroot on Twitter: http://twitter.com/webroot.

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