MessageOne EMS - Mail Management From The Cloud?
Howard Marks, InformationWeek
February 13, 2008 – MessageOne's whole premise is that it's easier and possibly cheaper to provide email filtering, continuity and archiving from the net than for organizations to use software and appliances and roll their own solutions. For many organizations, especially those with many distributed servers, it may. Lets take a look at how each of their services looks against the popular alternatives.
Starting with filtering, MessageOne uses technology from ProofPoint to filter viruses and spam out of the incoming mail stream. It has the kind of features most users want, including user by user white and black lists and quarantine. At around $1/user/mo it's more expensive than comparable service from Postini/Google (NSDQ: GOOG) but in line with the TCO of an appliance.
For continuity they snatch data from Exchange using event sinks, send them to their platform in the data center and populate a Linux mail server with the data. You can specify how long to keep items in each mailbox so execs can have 90 days of messages and most folks just a week to keep the storage costs down. You can fail over a user, group or whole server when testing or troubleshooting.
If I used a replication and fail-over solution like NeverFail or Sonasoft the software would set me back $6-10,000 and I'd need to set up, monitor, patch and eventually replace a server at a DR site where I'd also have to pay to have them house the server. If I have a bunch of branch offices I'd love to pay $300/mo for 100 users at each site than maintain 20 failover systems.
Finally for archiving they just up the retention period on their mail server, index the contents including the contents of 300+ types of files, and give you a cross mailbox search/eDiscovery user interface. It's not quite as cool as a Centera but at $1/user and storage charges that may add another $1 a user it's a lot cheaper.
Archiving Software like Symantec (NSDQ: SYMC) Enterprise Vault or Mimosa's Nearpoint cost $20-50/user. Add in a server, storage and backups and $2/user/mo may not look bad. On the other hand you won't stub as much data with MessageOne as you might with an on-site archive since users will notice that retrieving a stubbed attachment over the internet is slower than from the Exchange server.
Oh yeah it's one console for your Exchange Admin to learn not one each for filtering, failover and archiving.
