Alisa Systems Inc, the Pasadena, California-based company best known for its Macintosh-to-VAX integration products, has turned its attention to the mail gateway business. The company has taken its AlisaMail electronic mail package which runs on the Digital Equipment Corp VAX and added support for the seven most popular electronic mail packages. It is targeting the product as a direct competitor to Wayne, Pennsylvania-based Soft-Switch Inc’s eponymous product. Alisamail Version 4 supports cc:Mail, Microsoft Corp Mail, Novell Inc’s Message Handling Service, Da Vinci Mail and Quick Mail. It also retains support for the DEC world with support for Pathworks PC and Mac Mail. On the other hand, the company is shying away from what European managing director Brian Catt describes as the messy world of IBM Corp-based electronic mail. Instead, it relies on DEC’s Message Router software to provide links with DisOSS and Profs, as well as the X400 messaging standard. There is a direct X400 link on the drawing board, for December shipment, but nothing is planned yet for the X500 directory standard. Catt is rather scathing about X500 – not enough demand yet, he says, in fact he believes that there is virtually none. At the heart of Alisa’s sales pitch is its claimed ability to leave the end users sitting in their own electronic mail environment, while at the same time enabling them to address messages to foreign systems. One way that it attempts this is through a piece of client software called PeopleFinder, which runs on Macintoshes as a Desk Accessory and on MS-DOS personal computers as a Terminate and Stay Resident application. PeopleFinder is invoked by users at the point where they would normally address the electronic mail and according to Catt, displays all information that the foreign electronic mail directory holds on that user, which could be substantial if the addressee is on an X400 system, for example. Furthermore, the company claims transparent mapping between different systems of electronic mail addressing.
