C2C Systems had everything except a growth engine: a field-proven, analyst-endorsed archiving platform, four million users, and eighteen years of profitable operating history — but a single enterprise product, a thin North American channel, and no measurable link between marketing spend and pipeline. What began as a messaging-and-lead-generation engagement became a full go-to-market rebuild. The Artesian Network led it as C2C’s marketing leadership.
The Challenge
C2C was the rare early-stage company that was already profitable — privately held, funded by its own customers rather than VCs, with roughly a 48% US / 52% rest-of-world split and Fortune 1000 references. Its ArchiveOne platform was a fifth-generation, Tier-1 product in analysts’ eyes, with genuine engineering differentiation: forensic pre- and post-archive search, no SQL Server dependency, best-in-class PST management, and pluggable storage. The problem was never the product. It was that almost none of that advantage was being converted into repeatable growth.
The market underneath C2C had shifted. A single high-end enterprise SKU left the company exposed on two flanks — low-end vendors undercutting on price with feature-light tools, and big-brand Tier-1 competitors outspending it on air cover. In North America especially, C2C had leaned on direct sales for immediacy and had no scalable channel to recruit through. Worse, marketing couldn’t prove its worth: there was no marketing-automation or lead-nurturing system, organizational ambiguity over who directed marketing, and recent team churn — all of which made the line from marketing effort to closed pipeline nearly impossible to measure. C2C needed its story sharpened, its product line restructured for the market it was actually in, a channel to sell through, and a demand system that could be measured and managed.
What We Did
Operating as C2C’s marketing leadership, The Artesian Network:
- Repositioned C2C around a defensible, strength-led story — email-centric pedigree (4M users since 1992, developing on Exchange since 1996), Microsoft Gold Certified Partner standing, “Zero-Training User Design,” and Tier-1 analyst endorsement — translating deep technical features into buyer-facing benefits for both enterprise and SME audiences.
- Restructured the product line for the changed landscape: kept ArchiveOne Enterprise as the flagship, launched ArchiveOne Express built exclusively for the channel (Exchange environments, up to 200 mailboxes, simplified “archive-all” policies, fast install), and packaged ArchiveOne with CloudDR for cloud-based disaster recovery — with pricing set to protect Enterprise from above and blunt low-end vendors from below.
- Built the channel infrastructure end to end: a two-tier Accredited Reseller program, an opportunity-registration scheme to protect partner deals, achievable margins, and a Partner Zone with C2C-branded email templates, collateral, whitepapers, and sales/training presentations.
- Took ownership of the website to enable fast promotional changes and measurement, and drove SEO and content (TechTarget, IT Toolbox, ESG-based material) — raising engagement and share of search traffic and giving sales the referenceable content it had been missing.
- Stood up a measurable, tool-supported demand engine — email campaigns, paid search, and behavioral lead identification with disciplined sales follow-up cadences — and specified the marketing-automation and CRM integration needed to make the funnel ROI-attributable.
- Ran the credibility program a repositioning depends on: a Gartner engagement plan, a product-family press tour, ESG total-cost-of-ownership research and video, an economic value/ROI model, and a full sales-enablement library — and structured the i365 (Seagate) cloud alliance behind CloudDR.
The Outcome
The engagement did what early-stage go-to-market work is supposed to do: it took a strong, quiet company and made it legible and sellable. In roughly a single quarter, C2C went from one enterprise product to a tiered portfolio with a price architecture, a channel program, and a Partner Zone to recruit and enable resellers through — work Artesian’s own progress review noted “could take a large company two-to-three quarters to accomplish.” The owned website and SEO push moved real engagement metrics (time-on-site from 26 seconds to nearly two minutes; roughly 15-16% of traffic arriving from search), the demand engine began producing identifiable, followed-up leads for the first time, and the analyst, PR, and CloudDR/i365 program gave the repositioned line the outside credibility it needed.
The measurement gap that had made marketing hard to justify was addressed by design — owned web analytics, campaign tracking, and a specified path to marketing automation and CRM — rather than papered over with vanity numbers. That go-to-market foundation is what C2C carried forward. In September 2014, Barracuda Networks acquired C2C Systems — then a 22-year-old, UK-based provider of PST management, email archiving, and information management — folding ArchiveOne into Barracuda’s archiving portfolio.
Jonathan has provided a variety of marketing services to the company. He has excellent knowledge of the marketing mix. At a strategic level he offers a rare insight to the business and can add great value at Board level.