Mirapoint Inc has opened its first European office in Gerrards Cross, UK, and said it expects to generate 20% of company sales in Europe within 12 months. Albert Benhamou, Mirapoint’s VP for Europe the Middle East and Africa, said the company will also soon open offices in Germany too.
The Menlo Park, California company, set up in January 1998, launched its first products into the US market at the beginning of this year, and expects to generate between $5m and $10m of sales from its integrated messaging backbone servers in its first full year of trading.
The Mirapoint servers, which are delivered as a turnkey hardware, software and storage black boxes, are aimed at internet service providers looking for an instant messaging platform to offer to their service subscribers, and at large enterprises looking to consolidate and reduce the administration costs of existing mail systems.
For ISPs, said Benhamou, Mirapoint offers a box to rock service opportunity capable of supporting 85,000 users per server (depending on configuration) and priced at around $1 per user. The company is also trying to encourage larger ISPs to join its sales channel, by reselling Mirapoint servers to small and medium sized businesses as part of a managed messaging service.
In the enterprise space Mirapoint sees its services providing a cheaper to manage alternative to heterogeneous mail servers composed of multi-vendor platforms and proprietary software suites. In the corporate context, Benhamou said it expects Mirapoint servers to typically support communities of up to 4,000 users, working out at about $20 per user.
