This organisation has operations spread across five offices in three continents. It also has business development and client relationship managers spread across the world.

They have been using Merce since August 1998. When Merce deployment was started in this organisation, there were 846 email accounts in the company. In three year, this had crossed 3,000. Today's figure exceeds 10,000. Merce has scaled without problems.

The offices of this organisation are connected using high speed leased data circuits. They also have five external gateways, each secured with a redundant pair of Linux-based firewalls. Out of these, four connect to the Internet and one connects to the private WAN of a major business partner.

The Merce configuration here includes a master server in Mumbai and slave servers in each office. Each server is mirrored on a second backup server allowing for manual failover within minutes in case of a hardware problem. There are separate slave servers for email and Web proxy functions at each location because of the heavy loads on each function.

Users are created by an administrator sitting at any desktop in the enterprise, connecting to the Merce master server using a Web browser, filling up a simple HTML form. Daily summary reports of Web and email usage are generated and emailed to a select set of managers in the infrastructure management team.

A list of banned Websites is maintained using a Web-based interface in Merce, and access to these Websites is prohibited. The traffic logs provides insight into how bandwidth is often wasted in useless Web traffic.

The real-time network monitor of Merce (now called Merce Insight) is a part of the critical capacity planning process for infrastructure. The graphical reports of loads on servers and data traffic volumes on leased data circuits are closely monitored to allow proactive capacity augmentation. International leased data circuits are expensive and Merce permits effective monitoring of their capacity utilisation.

Commercial anti-virus filtering software has been integrated into slave email servers. The local virus signature file is updated via a central virus signature database a few times daily to minimise vulnerability windows.