Networld World Newsletter: Michael Osterman on Messaging

This newsletter was published on May 21st, 2001 by Network World Fusion. It will be available soon in the Network World Messaging Newsletter archive.

NETWORK WORLD NEWSLETTER: MICHAEL OSTERMAN on MESSAGING

Today's focus: Rockliffe climbs a mountain

By Michael Osterman

Back in December, I wrote about Rockliffe, a 50-person company that provides messaging systems aimed primarily at the ISP market. Although Rockliffe has only 10 million seats currently using its MailSite messaging system, giving it perhaps 2% to 3% of the ISP-based messaging market, the company is profitable and has recently entered into an interesting relationship with Compaq to provide highly reliable messaging capability.

Rockliffe's work with Compaq over the past six months has resulted in MailSite Himalaya, a messaging server based on the highly scalable and highly reliable Compaq Himalaya server. Compaq acquired and developed Himalaya through its acquisition of Tandem. In the Himalaya architecture, virtually every component is mirrored, and components can be added or replaced without bringing the system down. AOL, for example, runs the back end of its e-mail system on Himalaya servers.

In MailSite Himalaya, the message store and user directory have been ported onto the Himalaya server - all of the data is housed on the Himalaya server instead of Windows 2000, making Win 2000 essentially dataless application servers. Rockliffe claims that one of the key advantages of MailSite Himalaya is its scalability - a cluster of Himalaya nodes with multiple Win 2000 servers can support several million subscribers.

MailSite Himalaya will come bundled with WAP, Lightweight Directory Access Protocol, point of presence and Internet Message Access Protocol messaging support. It also features virus scanning, content filtering, antispam, antirelay and antidenial of service capability, integration with billing and accounting systems, and other features. Rockliffe's beta customers should be up by June and the product is planned for availability by year-end. Pricing has not been finalized.

Rockliffe believes that MailSite Himalaya will have lower administration costs than its competition. Rockliffe's goal is to undercut OpenWave InterMail's TCO - the company also believes that its TCO will be lower than that of iPlanet.

MailSite Himalaya is an interesting addition to Rockliffe's product line. This highly scalable server, coupled with Rockliffe's MochaMail client, gives Rockliffe a product line that is likely to be of interest to a growing number of ISPs, as well as enterprises looking to provide e-mail to some segments of the user base that need only e-mail access.

To contact Michael Osterman:

Michael D. Osterman is the principal of Osterman Research, a market research firm that helps organizations understand the markets for messaging, directory and related products and services. He can be reached at michael@ostermanresearch.com