RPost 2016 Year-in-Review, Trends & Outlook

The RPost team thanks you, our community of users, customers, partners, shareholders, and advocates, for another exciting year at RPost. Your support enables the RPost team to continue innovating for our customers, and to maintain RPost as a worldwide leader in cyber security, compliance, and productivity solutions.

Each year, we find it useful to reflect on our company’s mission and discuss the steps RPost is taking to further that mission for its users and customers.

As we head further into 2017, our mission continues to be to help businesses communicate and transact business electronically in the most secure, compliant, and productive ways possible. This year, based on customer feedback and market trends we discuss below, RPost is especially focused on the “secure” (cybersecurity) aspect of our mission. We believe cybersecurity plays a critical role in every service RPost offers, whether tracking, proving delivery, eSigning, authenticating, or sending large files.

Know more:

Electronic Signature

Digital Signature

Secure Email Services

Secure File Share Service

We thought we’d share our views on technology trends, how they map to key milestones our team has achieved over the past year, and what to expect from RPost going forward:

1. Cybersecurity becomes mission critical to business continuity for the foreseeable future.

• Within cybersecurity’s broad spectrum of tactics and applications, RPost is specifically focused on information privacy, authentication, and digital risk monitoring:
• Information Privacy: Meet the new “RMail”, with its “automatic” encryption mode for effortless email privacy compliance. RMail also offers “executive” mode for those in need of end-to-end privacy (to protect strategic secrets, for example). Additionally, RPost is planning a number of improvements to RMail encryption in 2017, including an updated user experience and a new “compliance filter” feature.
• Digital Risk Monitoring: Internet criminals have cost businesses more than $3B in financial losses in what the FBI calls “business email compromise” (BEC) attacks. RMail’s new “Anti-Whaling” digital risk monitoring technology protects against BEC attacks by alerting users of possible BEC-related activity.
• Authentication remains a core component of RPost technologies, both in managing user access to transmitted information and in verifying “who said (or sent) what when,” electronically.

2. eSignature services need to go beyond simply recording recipient signoff, electronically, and offer ample ways to streamline and automate business processes.

• For those looking to use standard eSignature services built into their email program, RMail includes these out-of-the-box. For those that view eSignatures as an opportunity to streamline a business process to boost productivity and customer satisfaction, meet the new RSign. RSign is a web-based eSignature platform designed for power users, offering features such as sequential signing, field rules, shared templates, form rules, embedded logic and dependencies, and more.

3. A natively integrated set of services will drive higher user satisfaction than multiple standalone services cobbled together.

• Whether in Microsoft Outlook, Outlook Online (Microsoft Office 365 Online, Hotmail), or Gmail, RMail embeds all your sending features for security, compliance, and productivity into your existing email user interface. There’s no need to cobble together a bunch of disparate services.
• RPost has partnered with more than half of the leading independent email software platforms and expects its RMail add-in to be embedded into these products for their millions of end users, in 2017 and beyond. Integrated partners enjoy the opportunity to add all the important sending features their users require, with one simple implementation.
• Stay tuned to see the new RPost Salesforce.com app being developed with an integrated user experience in mind, through a partnership with a leading Salesforce.com partner, coming in early 2017.

4. Businesses expect to be able to manage their web services accounts online, without going through a customer service rep.

• We are pleased to introduce RPost’s unified self-service customer portal, RPortal, where RPost customers can add and remove users, change service plans, adjust company-wide settings, create unique reports with a variety of filters, and schedule report data to be delivered in a variety of formats daily, weekly, monthly or on demand. RPost customer coaches are still available for those who prefer interaction with premium support staff.

5. More businesses will outsource email management to companies like Microsoft and Google.

• As they do, these businesses will no longer enjoy the same amount of access and control over their corporate email gateways, servers, and user interfaces. RMail gives back much of that control, providing on-demand sending features for high-value email, Registered Receipt™ proof records with verifiable audit trails, and the ability to configure a variety of settings at a company or user level.

6. Business software platforms must “open” to thrive.

• With the growth of online app marketplaces such as the Google Chrome store and Microsoft Office store, software platforms wishing to remain competitive must make it easier for external developers to build in their software services. RPost is opening programmatic access to at least 10 widely-used sending features in the company’s first “open-source” initiative, simplifying the path to meaningful 3rd party integrations. RPost is doing this in partnership with selected large email platforms.

7. Customer retention is king for the software-as-a-service business model.

• With small business customer retention rates in the 90% range, and large business customer retention in the 97% range, RPost customer success teams have effectively employed new tools like the Net Promoter Score system (NPS), automated user training and follow up calls based on usage levels, to ensure RPost customers are getting the most out of their RPost services.

8. Distributors and resellers embrace software-as-a-service products, enduring smaller per-order revenue, to create an ever-growing, recurring high margin revenue stream.

• Working with Ingram Micro, the world’s largest technology distributor, Microsoft, and others, RPost has completed an intensive project to build automation into its distributor/reseller management processes, with programs that integrate RPost user provisioning, billing, reporting, and service plan upgrades into third party systems and web tools via APIs.
• RPost has implemented these capabilities in multiple languages, and RPost services can now be sold by thousands of resellers around the world with automated back-office functionality.

Learn more about RPost’s partnership with Ingram Micro

9. More postal operators will finally begin to seek out alternative sources of revenue in e-postal services.

• RPost continues to extend its RPostal initiative, having been selected as the Registered Email™ standard technology for countries in the Americas, Middle East, Africa, Asia and Europe. In 2016, RPost grew existing e-postal and government partnerships, adding volume to its Bermuda Post and Certicamera (Colombia) operations, among others, and signing new e-postal partnerships with postal operators including CityPost, Post of Poland, and Kenya Post. In 2017, RPost looks forward to supporting the success of its postal and government partners.
• RPost added an operations hub in Frankfurt, Germany with eIDAS certification in mind, and language localization in English, German, French, Dutch, Danish, and Italian, with others to come.

10. Technology providers who practice “continuous innovation” will thrive.

• Every RPost service is continually being improved, with new feature enhancements, infrastructure improvements, and 3rd party integrations. For example, RMail received a significant update in 2016, adding important cybersecurity and productivity feature enhancements.
• RPost’s customer success team is always soliciting customer feedback (look out for our annual survey in the coming weeks) to understand how changing technologies and evolving business needs might influence how people use (or want to use) RPost services. The RPost team considers this feedback to drive planning in all critical areas of our business, including product development, customer success, and business development.

What’s Next?

For customers:

• Customers who haven’t made the jump to the newly improved RMail, get in touch with your account manager (or contact us) to get started.
• RPortal, RPost’s unified self-service customer portal, is now available. RPortal empowers customers to add and remove users, change service plans, adjust company-wide settings, create unique reports with a variety of filters, and schedule reports data to be delivered in a variety of formats daily, weekly, monthly or on demand. Get in touch with your account manager (or contact us) to get started.
• RSign, RPost’s web-based eSignature service, is here to help streamline and automate your business transactions with advanced capabilities including templates, dependencies, automated signoff logic, and more. Contact your account manager (or contact us) to request a demo or trial.
• RPost is expanding its customer success team and adding new tools, training resources, and educational content. RPost is making it easier for customer IT and operations staff to automate end user education within their companies.
• Product development roadmap highlights (Stay tuned to the RPost blog for more information.):
  • RPost will be revamping the email encryption user experience for RMail users, for even greater ease-of-use.
  • RPost will be adding a “compliance filter” feature, to automatically reduce the risk of non-compliance. There will also be automatically generated certified compliance reports for use in the event of a compliance audit.
  • RPost is adding integrations into many of the software platforms RPost customers use on a daily basis.
  • RPost will be improving the way Registered Email™ technology enables users to track email “opens”.
  • RPost is working on extending RMail’s SideNote® private note feature to include additional productivity tools for work groups.

For partners, investors, and the RPost team:

• RPost consistently enjoys analyst coverage and industry accolades from respected organizations such as Gartner, Forrester Research, and RESPRO – the largest integrated residential real estate organization. The RPost team will continue to work with industry experts, analysts, and customers to deliver best-in-class solutions.
• RPost has agreed to make its RMail extension open source, as a security upgrade for 200 million email users that operate on a leading platform.
• RPost will continue to build its technologies deeply into established work flows for regulated industries such as insurance, legal, finance, health care, real estate, and others.
• RPost will continue to emphasize technology thought leadership, extending its 250,000 weekly business readership of Tech Essentials and contributing meaningful insights to discussions around emerging or dynamic technologies.
• RPost has been selected to be the government standard for email security and certified email delivery for one of the oldest sovereign states in Europe. We expect this to work together with new European regulations like eIDAS that map to RPost’s core Registered Email technology, to create a surge in demand for RPost services across Europe.
• More software platforms are choosing to integrate elements of RPost technologies into their products, encouraging their business users to secure and streamline their work flows.

Thank You

The RPost team appreciates the opportunity to continue serving the thousands of corporate customers and more than 25 million users that have relied on RPost services over the last decade. While it is useful to reflect on our team’s advancements and progress over the past year, our strategy continues to be guided by our goal to position and maintain every RPost service as the top choice for new and existing users worldwide. To this end, we trust you will be excited to see what the RPost team delivers in 2017.

On behalf of the team, I wish the entire RPost community a safe and successful year ahead.

– Zafar Khan, CEO of RPost

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