A Compatible Alternative to Microsoft Exchange

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When asked, why develop an alternative to Microsoft Exchange? PostPath CEO Duncan Greatwood replies that every market needs an alternative. While Greatwood understands Exchange is a multi-billion dollar market, he believes that people should have a choice. Beyond that, Greatwood notes that IT departments have found Exchange to be expensive, not only the product, but also the other parts of the system that become impacted, such as storage, back-up and restore, high-availability, as well as an increasing requirement for mobile, and big mailboxes.

“To a large extent, Microsoft is a closed world,” observes Greatwood. “If you want to do presence with Microsoft, then you have to accept the whole Microsoft package.” He goes on to say that organizations may miss out on the gains that have been made around open architectures and standards. “An IT department needs to decide if it wants to be locked into a one-vendor solution.” Historically, the switch away from Exchange has been a difficult sell, largely because of the closed system. The Outlook desktops, BlackBerry users, and ActiveSync users, plus the need to co-exist with some of the Exchange environment, makes it difficult to do. “PostPath is unique in that the we offer network protocol interoperability with all of the Microsoft features. For example, Outlook cannot tell the difference between an Exchange server and the PostPath server, similar for BlackBerry. In fact an Exchange server can communicate with a PostPath server,” says Greatwood. “This is a huge deal in terms of enabling adoption. Organizations can run a mixed Exchange/PostPath infrastructure or migrate away from Exchange entirely.”

According to Greatwood, not only is Exchange 2007 a more complicated product than before, the costs to migrate are high. “The transition costs to move from Exchange 2003 are much higher than people expected.” Greatwood offers an example of a customer that has upwards of 100,000 employees that had budgeted US$50,000,000 for migration, but opted to abandon the project because the costs were so much more.

PostPath is a Linux-based file system store. “This makes PostPath much more efficient with storage, it makes back-up and restore much easier, and high-availability easier.” Greatwood says these efficiencies allow for the desired big mailboxes. “PostPath can bring the Linux cost structure in storage, in servers, in tools, in manageability, into the enterprise without having to abandon Outlook or other Microsoft enabled applications.”

Microsoft will remain a market leader. “They will win plenty of customers, and the company is strong in all kinds of ways,” concedes Greatwood. “However, we definitely see Exchange 2007 creating a big business opportunity for PostPath, because it is disrupting the existing infrastructure that organizations have with previous Exchange servers. Now organizations are asking themselves if migrating to 2007 is what they really want to do.”

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