IBM will sell Software.com’s carrier-class messaging software, InterMail, to internet service providers, telcos and portals. Software.com will port the product, which is already available on Sun, SGI and Compaq servers. InterMail is built to support millions of mailboxes reliably and with high availability. Software.com says the product is aimed at much bigger fish than the enterprise-scale rivals from Sun Microsystems Inc and Sendmail Inc. The big difference is scale, says Software.com president Valdur Koha, the Sun product and Sendmail were initially designed and developed for enterprise configurations, which are highly distributed, with low numbers of users sharing a large number of servers deployed on local or departmental basis. A service provider deploys internet services in very centralized fashion. They have very large servers clustered in secure, centralized locations. According to Koha, that’s a fundamental change in architecture. Carriers need to run tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of mailboxes on a single server. Those architectural differences make it difficult for an enterprise product to be successful in service provider space, he says. That probably explains why IBM announced this deal the day after launching its own competitor to Sendmail, Secure Mailer (see separate story). Big Blue says it entered the agreement with Software.com in order to extend its portfolio of scalable products for ISPs. Koha believes the partnership will strengthen InterMail’s reputation in the market. IBM is a very strong play in the telco business, he said, the combination of InterMail with IBM’s clustering technology is a huge plus. Koha adds that IBM has a number of successful server products which should combine well with InterMail. The best example is IBM’s Intelligent Subscriber Management System (ISMS), which handles billing and enrolment for ISPs. An InterMail/ISMS package could be a bestseller in the carrier market.
