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Kiwi company SMX has completed a ‘lighthouse’ sale in Japan, with its SMX Cloud email security solution being rolled out to 40,000 users at 7000 companies around the country.

Jesse Ball, SMX CEO and co-founder, says the sale is highly strategic and signals the beginning of a significant change in the attitude of Japanese businesses to cloud services following major data losses suffered during last year’s earthquake and tsunami.

“It is a lighthouse sale for us because it demonstrates how quickly and easily a large number of customers and users can be provisioned, at a cost and at a level of email filtering accuracy that can’t be matched by traditional email filtering solutions,” Ball says.

Japanese internet hosting company Ride completed the implementation. Ride is a subsidiary of Radix, one of the largest office equipment suppliers to small- to medium-sized businesses in Japan, with 150,000 customers. “We anticipate a high number of existing and future Radix customers will also become SMX customers over time,” Ball says.

James Porteous, SMX Japan country manager, says cloud email filtering is a logical entry point for the many large Japanese corporations who are aggressively pursuing cloud solutions in the wake of the earthquake and tsunami.

He says SMX is in talks with Japan’s top five manufacturing companies and top three trading houses, as well as making presentations to a number of IT companies dominant in the Japanese market.