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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