By William Fellows

Email appliance outfit Mirapoint Inc has chopped down its entry-level price point to $10,000 from $15,000 with the introduction of two new low-end systems which replace the existing M100 server. Where the M100 was a cut-down version of its high-end M1000 server the SP270 and three ES models have been designed with specific markets in mind and have storage and power supply integrated into a 3U unit.

The SP270 is designed for local service providers hosting up to 70,000 POP mail boxes. The ES has three design points; the model 210 for up to 300 users, the 220 and 230 for up to 600 and 1,000 users respectively. The M1000 is for users with 70,000 to 150,000 mailboxes. That can handle 500,000 messages an hour. The company expects to develop systems which can handle 5m an hour. The ES210 starts at $10,000; the SP270 is from $29,000 with 27Gb disk. The M100 was a $15,000-up machine. They can support up to six 18Gb drives. At the low-end and mid-range it claims Sun, Exchange and freeware as its competition; Sun, Software.com and freeware at the high-end.

Mirapoint says it has shipped 50 revenue units and has another 50 evaluation units in the field. Apple and Cisco are its best-known users. Others include DSL provider HarvardNet and the UK’s Demon Interactive which is rolling out Mirapoint servers across its ISP system. Frontier Communications resells the servers. It says two thirds of its systems are with application service providers.

Mirapoint said its nose wasn’t put out of joint when Frontier went to the Sun-Netscape alliance for its future messaging products. That deal went through Frontier’s Rochester, New York group (formerly GlobalCenter which Frontier bought in February 1998), not the Sunnyvale, California group it has a relationship with.

As the market for dedicated function appliances heats up, Mirapoint is readying standalone appliances for introduction in the fall which will perform services at the edge of the network.

Mirapoint, which now likes to think of itself as a software company, is beginning to open up to the opportunity for marketing its system software as a standalone product, which it has calved from Unix and runs on Intel. It’s seeking OEMs and is already packaging Lexicom’s calendar software and expects to OEM it later this year, has CMGI’s Nascent webmail, anti-virus software from TrendMicro (it does anti-virus work on the network rather than at the client), and is about to announce a fax-over-IP solution from NetMoves.