Who would have thought, ten or fifteen years ago, that lowly email would ever be as important as, say, a billing or ERP system to keeping an organization up and running? Email is now a core application not only because of the communications it allows, but because of the variety and importance of the files users attach to their emails. Attachments such as marketing Powerpoints, CAD design files, reorg memos and sales spreadsheets make messaging servers – primarily Microsoft Exchange – mission-critical. Storage managers who try to keep users’ email files from swamping their available disk space run into resistance because those files (including attachments) have become a de facto enterprise database.
That’s why an entire ecosystem (to use Microsoft’s term) of products has grown up around keeping Exchange running. Some, such as CA XOsoft WANSyncHA from CA (formerly Computer Associates) and Double-Take Application Manager (DTAM) for Exchange from Double-Take Software Inc. consist of software that replicates Exchange data among primary and backup servers, keeping the backup server ready for fail-over at a moment’s notice.
Teneros Inc. recently briefed me on their very different approach, which is to deploy their fully-managed appliance at an SMB (small to medium business) site. Their Teneros Application Continuity Appliances for Microsoft Exchange includes software for monitoring the production Exchange database, examining message objects for corruption and handling the failover between the primary Exchange server and the Teneros appliance.
Their pitch of being very easy to manage and to install is of course appealing to an SMB audience, but it’s a note almost every vendor is trying to hit these days. Given that email is so critical, I wonder how many companies will be willing to trust it to a four-year-old privately-held company such as Teneros. Co-founder and CEO Steve Lewis responds that the firm is “driving towards a profit in the upcoming four quarters,” has raised $45 million from backers which include Goldman Sachs and New Enterprise Associates and will shortly make an announcement that will “put any questions as to how much money we have to rest.”
All well and good. But what with all the fretting about a global credit crunch, I’d be curious to hear from such early-stage firms how they guarantee their customers’ service in case they (the vendor) can’t get enough money to make it to profitability. That would be a real differentiator to tout to the press/analyst community -- not to mention to customers.
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