Secure Information Systems Ltd, the joint venture between British Telecommunications Plc and SD-Scicon Plc, reckons it has stolen the march over rivals such as Retix Corp, OSIware and Touch Communications Inc with the launch of the first X400 messaging and electronic mail system to conform to the CCITT 1988 standard, an integral part of CCITT’s GOSIP 3.1 Open Systems Interconnection profile. While most companies are said to be some 18 months away from being in a position to offer the latest X400 standard, Secure Information claims that it will have its Open 400 product up and running on an OEM customer’s hardware within three months of signing the order. X400 88 is substantially different from the 1984 version, which failed to include such essential items as a message store and distribution lists, and had only primitive addressing and security facilities, without encryption or non-repudiation options. Subsequently, manufacturers were forced to add those features themselves, and each implemented them in a proprietary way. Secure Information, a late entry into the X400 market, says that it does not have the millstone of X400 84 developments behind it and therefore has a commanding lead. The company is initially aiming at major OEM deals, and sales and marketing manager Roger Marshallsay is off to the US this week to talk to five system vendors about the product. The new version, says Marshallsay, will be essential for vendors responding to government procurements both at home and abroad, as it is part of the UK and US GOSIP profiles – and Secure Information says it can offer OEM customers a special deal by throwing in its existing Secure X400 implementation, which will also be X400 88-compliant by next September. Open 400 includes interfaces to enable OEM customers to add value, especially in such areas as adding a user interface to X Window, Uniplex or other products. Marshallsay predicts that, despite the slow take-up of OSI by commercial companies to date, and the lip-service paid to it by many hardware manufacturers, OSI has now reached its critical mass, and demand will explode over the next few years. The X400 market itself is set to grow by a factor of three over the next four years, so that around 15,000 multi-user computers and 500,000 personal computers will use it for communications by 1994 – with X400 88 remaining the basis of the technology, despite a planned further standards revision in 1992. But Marshallsay predicts that the big boost in X400 will come in the form of electronic data interchange rather than simple messaging. A new user agent for EDI over X400, called PEDI (protocol for EDI) is currently being specified for introduction next year, and the European Commission is working hard to get European agreement over EDI standards through its TEDIS programme.
