Unified Messaging Demands Open Standards

In a world where messages are sent to and from an almost limitless variety of communication devices, like iPods, Cell phones, Blackberry's (or NPD-berrys), and something currently in a lab, the need to retain messages for subsequent access and retrieval says that we must have a set of standards that define messaging formats. If not, we have to render the message differently each time it's requested or worse, store each message in a number of different formats.

Here's a scenario: An employee sends a video message using her cellphone to a colleague who reads it on a laptop in the departure lounge of the airport , but he then wants to see it again on his Blackberry while waiting in line at the car rental agency. We could go on with this forever. The point is that messages are no longer transiatory - they have a shelf-life of months or years and as a result cannot be confined by a specific sending or receiving technology. Organizations with unified messaging in their plans should pressure the industry to agree on messaging standards or face nightmarish storage management.

The old expression "the great thing about standards is that we have plenty of them" once again, applies. We have standards for Internet mail, SMS, instant messages (sort of), X.400/x.435 for specialty applications. And of course, pretty much every industry has its own set of message standards e.g., SWIFT for banking; AFTN for air traffic control, etc.

However, standards do exist that can be leveraged for this purpose. Standards like RFC 822 for Internet e-mail or XML document standards can, and are likely to, be used for message storage that is independent of device and delivery methods.

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E-mail Archiving for the Small Business - Because your e-mail content is every bit as critical as theirs

If you run or work in a small business you know that digital information is as valuable to you as it is to larger companies. Why therefore is e-mail archiving generally only discussed in context of large or regulated businesses?

A business looks to archive e-mail for a wide variety of reasons - compliance and legal protection just happen to be the two reasons that get the most publicity and vendor hype. But the other reasons to archive e-mail, although not garnering as much publicity, are generally more often the impetus behind investing and apply equally to any size business.

Here are just some of the reasons for e-mail archiving that are not the exclusive purview of big business:

1. To etablish a single central long-term corporate message store that leaves important content contained within e-mails and their attachments easily accessible to executives and others;

2. To provide users with a solution to their growing demand for more scalable e-mail storage;

3. To optimizes mail server performance and server back-ups by removing much of the server's storage responsibility.

Most of today's e-mail archiving solutions were designed solely with compliance and the large enterprise as targets. Vendors are now trying to force-fit these solutions into the small-midsize business (SMB) with little success.

In the US, the Birthplace of Compliance, an SMB is considered to be any business with 100-1000 employees. But in most of the rest of the world, a business with 50-100 employees is not at all considered small. According to Microsoft, there are over 40 million small businesses worldwide. By their definition, a small business is one with less than 50 staff. So, of course included in that 40 million is a lot of mom and pop shops with little need for added e-mail storage, but even if you filter out the mom and pops, and add back in those businesses with between 50-100 employees, you have an enormous market segment. The point is that there is a huge growing need for better e-mail storage amongst the small business sector, a group of businesses that relies as much as, or maybe even more than, the large enterprise on e-mail for its business communication.

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Corporate Messaging - The Last of the Closed Systems

Organizations using commercial e-mail applications like Microsoft Exchange or Lotus Notes/Domino have no choice in what they use as their message store. License Exchange and you get Microsoft's proprietary Jet database. License Domino and you get a Notes database. But, what if you wanted the scalability of an Oracle or DB2 database as your Exchange message store instead of the Jet? Sorry, you're out of luck.

Because mail server applications also reach deep into the user's mail-client, a great deal of server-functionality is only available to those with a specific mail client. For example, Outlook accesses Exchange using a proprietary protocol, so although you can use POP3 mail clients with Exchange, this is only at a considerable cost in functionality.

Architecturally, we at NorthSeas refer to the restricted links between the mail client and the server application, and between the server application and the proprietary message store, as "Layers of Dependence". If you choose one component, you're stuck with the others. So why should you care? Well, for one, there's severely limited scalability and choice. When storage requirements exceed the capacity available on a given server, you can't just simply add storage to the information store as you would let's say in a SAN. There's only so much storage you can add to a mail server without experiencing performance problems or creating impossible back-up windows. More often than not, adding more e-mail storage requires the addition of another mail server.

Why are messaging vendors so reluctant to open up their information stores? Simple, look at e-mail servers as a corporate database, and then you'll understand why the two leaders - Microsoft and IBM - view messaging as part of its database product strategy. And, as they say in the database business - whoever owns the data, owns the account. According to IDC, a majority of corporate information assets are stored in e-mail messages and atachments. Therefore, whatever database holds the customers e-mail content naturally should become their defacto database. Watch for Microsoft to replace Jet with SQL Server following the upcoming Exchange 12 release, and IBM to similarly replace its Notes database with DB2.

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Off to CeBit

For the first time since the early 90s, I'm heading off next week to the famous CeBit Fair in Hannover Germany, the world's largest computer show (www.cebit.de). If you're not familiar with CeBit, here are some vitals - 6 days; 27 buildings; 315,000 square metres of exhibition space; over 6,000 exhibitors; and 474,000 visitors. I will be spending time with our Benelux distributor, IT-Data, at their booth in Hall 1 as well as meeting with some of our vendor partners and other European distributors. If you are in Hannover on March 13 or 14, be sure to drop by the IT-Data booth and say hello.

After two days at the CeBit zoo (I'm not sure I could endure more than two days), I'll head back to the Netherlands where I'll be speaking at "Studyday E-Mail Management" in Zeist on March 15th.

On my way over to CeBit I stop off for a few days in England to visit customers, resellers and our UK distributor, ProDefence, located in Worthing on the south coast. The best part of spending the weekend in sleepy Worthing is the opportunity it gives me to attend a live soccer match. I'm passionate about small club football and Worthing's quaint Woodside park (http://soccerramblings.blogspot.com) has a maximum capacity of only 500 spectators. Brighton, a League Championship side (one level below the esteemed English Premier League) is only a short drive down the road and likely to be a much livelier atmosphere, but unfortunately both matches kick-off at the exact same time. Decisions. Decisions.

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Running with the Elephants - Competing Against Mammoths

I am asked quite often how NorthSeas a small start up can compete against industry giants like EMC, Symantec, and IBM. I may sound naive when I say this (a criticism I willingly accept) but with every fibre of my being I believe that we can compete well in this crowded space and succeed, if only for the simple reason that today's IT Managers and CIOs no longer see products from Big Vendors as automatically superior.

I know it probably sounds like a cliche but hear me out: During the 90s, a decade epitomized by the Big Software Solution and the previous Big Iron decade of the 80s, Fear Uncertaintly and Doubt (FUD) ruled the IT planet. The prevailing logic was that if you wanted a career, choose one of the big vendors because "no one ever got fired..." well, you know how it went.

But today's CIO's are a different breed. They've seen the overspending and under-delivery of monolithic solutions like ERP, CRM, client-server, etc, and in many cases personally handled the messes they left behind. Today's IT leaders recognize that careers are no longer determined by the magnitude of their implementation projects but by their results. There's a new IT passion now - a passion for simple, effective, and managed solutions.

SMBs now represent 50% or more of IT spending and the vendors that thrived during the halycon days of the Big Software decade are struggling to force feed their solutions to a customer base that just isn't hungry for it. Despite their marketing spiels, the mammoths of the IT industry cannot easily alter the complexity and cost of their solutions that has made them inherently unpalatable to this critical segment of customers.

We will succeed at this by sticking to our knitting. We need to be the best at combining simplicity with effectiveness. We need to ensure that we never lock customers in - either to their messaging application or to us. We need to make e-mail archiving a part of the storage infrastructure. In short, we need provide SMBs and Enterprise customers what they want.

The number of partners sharing this passion with us is growing daily. We are a long way from our goal but with enough diligence and attention to detail, we will challenge the conventional wisdom that made bigger better and allowed FUD-marketing to succeed. In 1998 Google was three-guys in a garage. Innovation comes in small packages.

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