Cisco buys Exchange-a-like vendor PostPath

Updated with more commentary 4.16pm UTC. Hello, Techmeme.

Suddenly, things are getting interesting again in the Exchange-alternatives market.

The quintessential growth-by-acquisition specialist, Cisco (CSCO), has just announced that it's acquiring PostPath.

Once again, Cisco makes a sound investment in an email technology vendor. Just like it did with IronPort. Great choice.

These are the clever guys who reverse-engineered the Exchange client protocol, MAPI/RPC, and the related on-the-wire details needed to make a vanilla install of Outlook talk to a non-Exchange mail server with full fidelity. Impressive stuff.

Despite Om Malik's analysis, this is quite a bit different from Zimbra.

Of all the other Exchange alternatives, PostPath has the most interesting architecture. And I say that as one who has years emotionally invested in the OpenMail technology ;-)

All the others rely on additional software on the desktop. In the case of OpenMail/SamsungContact/Scalix/Domino/etc., a MAPI service provider "plugin". Or, like Bynari/OpenXchange/etc., a separate app that synchronized an IMAP store with an Outlook.PST (personal store file).

I think Cisco fell out of love with Microsoft a while back. Something to do with VoIP support in Exchange and how Cisco thought it was Microsoft's partner but it turned out that Microsoft was competing with them. Nothing familiar there at all...

Sounds like Cisco wants to offer SaaS collaboration, based on PostPath and WebEx. Whoever said the email world has become dull and uninteresting?

Thanks to Jeff Brainard for the tip.

On Microsoft Online Services

On July 8, Microsoft formally announced its new Online hosted services. These are “in the cloud”, or software-as-a-service (SaaS) implementations of Exchange and SharePoint (not to be confused with Exchange Hosted Services, which is the hosted email security service formerly from Frontbridge).

Microsoft first announced this more than a year ago, and has been offering it in beta form for several months.

The services run in Microsoft’s own datacenters, on shared hardware — or dedicated hardware for larger customers.

In June I saw a demo of the tools to migrate users from an in-house Exchange network to the service. It looks comprehensive. The most useful aspect is that a customer can choose a subset of their users to move to the service, retaining other users on the in-house system.

Naturally, the service allows customers to synchronize their Active Directory (AD) forest between their in-house AD servers and the ones in the cloud.

Of course, this puts Microsoft into direct competition with their partners who are already offering hosted Exchange/Sharepoint — often using market development funds from Microsoft itself. However, this does at least validate the market. Microsoft will also allow partners to resell the Online services, with some attractive affiliate kickbacks.

For the combination of Exchange, OCS, LiveMeeting, and SharePoint Online, Microsoft announced the price would be $15.

$15 is too expensive. Here’s two reasons why:

First, compare that price with Google Apps at $50/year ($4.17/month). At one third the price, the combination of white-label Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Sites, and Google Talk may not provide 100% feature equivalence — but in most cases it will be more than good enough. Don’t forget that Google offers 25GB of email storage at that price, versus Microsoft’s 1GB, which is paltry by comparison. Some organizations may even find the free version of Google Apps is sufficient for their needs, assuming they can live with the lack of a service-level agreement.

Second, Microsoft doesn’t seem to have learned from the mistakes of others. Over the past ten years, we’ve seen vendor after vendor try to offer hosted Exchange — many of them backed by substantial Microsoft resources — but few have survived. Again, the problem is one of cost. Although the vendors would make a coherent, well-argued case that an organization should migrate to its hosted service, few IT managers believed it would save them money.

These vendors would tell potential purchasers that they could provide the service for less money than it was currently costing to run it in-house, but when it came time to actually quote for the service, most IT managers simply didn’t believe it cost them that much.

For fans of Economics 101, the hosted providers were charging more than the market would bear. Looks like Microsoft is making the same mistake. It’s a pity: Exchange 2007 is much more suited to offering the required economies of scale than previous versions.

"Secure Resolutions" Sends Spam

Update August 25: Just a quick note. I'd appreciate it if shills for Secure Resolutions would stop emailing me to say I'm an ignorant idiot.

Update June 19: VerticalResponse has confirmed that Secure Resolutions's account is now closed and banned. Well done, guys.

Yesterday, I got email from some company called Secure Resolutions.

We are contacting you because you are currently a customer or you have been a customer and we would like to continue to be your supplier of anti-malware and backup protection. I would like to take this opportunity to introduce you to our award winning, patented technology...

etc., etc., etc.

Trouble is, I've never heard of them, and the role account they sent it to is incapable of being a "customer" of anyone. Yes, friends: ergo, this email was spam.

(Incidentally, there seems to be some connection between this company and Panda Security, who I've also caught spamming.)

The company uses VerticalResponse to send this spam, so I shot a note to their abuse alias and got an encouraging note back from their Email Delivery & Policy Enforcement team. VR says it has "completely disabled" the Secure Resolution's account and "opened an investigation."

Watch this space for updates.

Anyone else had problems with this sender?

Scott Richter Settles Another Spam Suit

Oh looky, it's our "friends" Steve and Scott Richter in the news again. This time, they've settled with MySpace for $6 million after being accused of spamming thousands of MySpace.com users -- and using phished accounts to do it (see today's IT Blogwatch for more).

Of course, Scott gave up spamming some time ago. Or did he? Brian Krebs today offers an interesting investigation into domain registrations of spamvertised Web sites:

More than three quarters of all Web sites advertised through spam are clustered at just 10 domain name registrars ... Out of the 15,000 spam-advertised domains we examined, nearly half -- 7,142 names -- were registered through a Broomfield, Colo. company called Dynamic Dolphin ... the seventh most-popular registrar among spammers ... [and] owned by a company called CPA Empire, which in turn is owned by Media Breakaway LLC. The CEO of Media Breakaway is none other than Scott Richter, the once self-avowed "Spam King" who claims to have quit the business. Anti-spam groups also have recently implicated Media Breakaway in the alleged hijacking of more than 65,000 Internet addresses for use in sending e-mail and hosting commercial Web sites.

Remember kids, Rule #1: Spammers lie.

The Top 25 B-to-Z List Blogs

My piece at the "new" Industry Standard is finally up, with additional additions from Ian Lamont.

"These are the blogs you won't see on the Techmeme Leaderboard, Technorati's Top 100 blogs, or the CruchBase BloggerBoard ... at least not yet. They include VCs, entrepreneurs, coders, experts, and observers, and they bring a delicious mix of insight, experience, and passion to their blogs. While they may not have the right amount of link love, they need to be on your radar screens."

Hello, BlackBerry Bold and its Sexy New UI

Wow, from the look of this video, Research in Motion has really done a great job of sprucing up its user interface. Looks speedy, too.

I've always been a PalmOS fanboi (I know, I know) and have gone through a succession of devices: original Pilot, Palm V, Treo 180, 270, 600, 650 -- but this could be the device that finally weans me off of PalmOS.



Disclosure: RIM is a client.

More of this nonsense in today's IT Blogwatch.

Hat tip: Kevin Michaluk.

Lost in Translation? Bill Gates in Korea...

Something very wrong here...

SEOUL, South Korea (AP) — Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates said there will be a vast shift in Internet technology over the next decade as he met Tuesday with South Korean President Lee Myung-bak.

"We're approaching the second decade of (the) digital age," the software mogul and philanthropist told Lee at the start of their meeting at the presidential Blue House, according to a media pool report.

"The Internet has been operating now for 10 years," Gates said. "The second 10 years will be very different."

Excuse me? “The Internet has been operating now for 10 years”???

Uhh, tell that to the National Science Foundation, who switched on the Internet as we know it today in 1983, migrating from the old ARPANET, which had been going since 1969.

He can’t possibly mean the Web, as that’s been going for over 15 years. He can’t even mean Internet Explorer — the first version of which was released in 1994.

Bizarre.