GPM Internet is the leading communications service provider located in the heart of the corporate business district of Melbourne, Australia. GPM was established in response to the clear demand for quality Internet access and hosting solutions for the small and medium size enterprise market. GPM CEO George Nikolaidis says, "Our expertise in VPN's, VoIP and high speed internet access is only matched by our dedication and support to our customers". "We are continually researching ways to improve our service for our clients, through innovation, service and growth."

GPM were faced with a challenge - to remain at the forefront of ISP service providers. GPM continues to look for ways to deliver value to its customers and wanted to minimise the risk of diminishing access revenue, while ensuring the 'stickiness' of their service. George said "it's all about continuing to add value and deliver exceptional service". Additionally, some of GPM's clients had identified rapidly increasing Internet bandwidth usage, reducing response times and some were observing non-business related downloading of Internet material by employees.

GPM scoured the market for a solution that would be flexible enough to suit their clients' business needs, while offering a simple and cost effective method of filtering. GPMs wish to remain at the forefront of ISP solution providers, identified that they wished to offer one of the first 'clean' Internet services in the district, but it must easy and simple for GPM and their clients.

Global research has shown that 30-40% of Internet activity at work is for personal reasons and remarkably, up to 70% of Internet porn traffic occurs during working hours. As employees spend more and more of their time at work, and appreciate the ability to be able to use online banking, shopping and personal email out of work hours. Thus GPM's clients were unwilling to put a product in place that would block all personal Internet surfing, though they wanted to stop inappropriate Internet access by employees and they wanted the customer to have some control.

Therefore, GPM needed a flexible solution which would efficiently block URL's, and maintain a balance between reasonable person use and reducing Internet access costs to their clients.

There were a number of essential elements identified by GPM, including:

• flexibility for their clients to make decisions about what was appropriate Internet usage, in accordance with their company's Internet Usage Policy;
• simplicity of use and control for clients, along with a level of reporting if they required;
• the provision of a network based value-added service for clients;
• low maintenance, low administration and completely automatic operation;
• no impact on bandwidth throughput or GPM's network.

GPM looked to ContentKeeper Technologies for assistance. ContentKeeper Technologies is the leader in the provision of Internet filtering solutions for Corporate, Government and ISP service providers.

GPM chose ContentKeeper to fulfil the web-filtering space in their innovative iGuardianTM service, which offers best of breed anti-spam, anti-virus, and Web content filtering. ContentKeeper, with their technologically superior, patented Closed Loop Collaborative Filtering TM, and time of day technology offered GPM Internet the ideal solution.

George said "most of the WEB filter systems we looked at were primarily designed for corporate environments. ISP's need a true "multi tenant" based system that offer flexible customisation. Also, because ISP's have to deal with a broad range of end users that have vastly different levels of technical ability, the filter management front end has to be simple to configure but powerful enough to satisfy the requirements of most power users."

ContentKeeper worked with GPM personnel to design a web filtering solution that provided complete flexibility and choice for their clients, while vastly more efficient than older technologies in use in other parts of the world. This resulted in the customer having simple and effective controls along with no impact on the GPM network availability and Internet throughput. George commented that in their search, "the older 'dictionary based' technologies developed latency on the network and that could not be sustained in the new world". "The customisation capabilities of ContentKeeper delivers exactly what our customers are looking for."

ContentKeeper allows GPM's clients many options for blocking and reporting, including blocking, coaching and authentication options, while allowing for full functionality of Internet access using state-of-the-art technology.

According to George Nikolaidis "ContentKeeper has allowed us to offer our clients the opportunity to reduce unauthorised personal usage, and regain lost productivity."

ContentKeeper also offers users the ability to reduce legal exposure, such as copyright and workplace litigation resulting from illegal and inappropriate Internet access in the workplace.

iGuardian offers users a centrally managed service to monitor, manage and control employee access to the internet, with near-zero maintenance.

iGuardian offers the most accurate blocking and filtering system available.

iGuardian offers fast, economical deployment.

All powered by ContentKeeper Technologies, who, according to the General Manager of ContentKeeper Technologies, Geoff Wood "are proud to partner with GPM Internet to offer fantastic value-added service to GPM clients. Working with GPM to provide outstanding service to their clients, we hope has assisted GPM to remain the market leader in Internet service solutions and in turn the capacity to increase their market share through a competitive edge."