Q Sendmail has been around a long time. How has it changed focus over the years?
A Most people tend to view us as the open source MTA [message transfer agent] company. We created that 27 years ago. We started to allow disparate email systems to start sending emails to each other – in a way we created world wide email. Ten years ago, we formed a commercial company to leverage our core competency and we started to add capabilities. Now we’re focused on helping enterprises modernise their email infrastructures.
Email management is actually split into three layers. There’s the ‘hygiene’ layer with anti-virus and anti-spam, which might be in the cloud or in-house. In house, there’ s the mail store – your Exchange or Lotus Notes. And there’s also a crucial middle piece – the routing and policy layer. That’s the difficult part. SMEs don’t need that, but with large enterprises there’s a whole load of issues about routing emails, particularly if they’ve acquired or divested businesses. They also need to think about policies and compliance issues.
There’s a whole complexity level that people don’t realise they have. Normally, companies have a set of people that perform black magic with the Opens Source MTA piece, but what we’re finding is companies are spending a lot of cash in keeping that system up and running. So modernising the infrastructure can cut costs.
Email was never meant to be a transactional system, but just for sending a note to someone else. When companies go for a technical refresh, particularly in the current climate, people are cost conscious so start to investigate and they find that their email system is actually transactional and applications have grown up that are generating emails. So we find we’re called in to do an architectural review and look at all email traffic and how it’s managed.
Q What costs savings can companies expect from modernising their email infrastructure?
A You can get cost savings by consolidation of servers or virtualisation. There are cost savings around reducing your hardware footprint and that has a knock-on effect in terms of power savings and rack space. Lots of data centres are under pressure to optimise usage. There’s also an opportunity to reduce administration as you can redeploy people to other parts of the business.
Q Do you see the end of email ahead as people begin to use social media instead?
A I don’t think so. Social media is around and there’s plenty of organisations who use and also those that try to ban it, because they don’t have the controls over it as they have with email. We can handle HTTP and instant messages, but even with social messaging the bulk of communication is still email.
I’m sure that social media traffic is going to grow, but demand for our product is still healthy. In five years time, maybe there will be less reliance on SMTP traffic, but it’s not going to disappear overnight. Even if you take out the business of email traffic there’s still considerable traffic management needed to do with mobile devices.
Q Should companies outsource their email management?
A Certainly with anti-virus and anti-spam there’s plenty of people who want to push it outside the organisation, especially as there’s something like a 6% growth in spam each month. If you look at what you’d need to handle that traffic it kind of makes sense to outsource it. So plenty of people will put anti-virus and anti-spam in the cloud rather than inside an organisation.
But when you talk about outsourcing everything else – do you really want all your data out there in the cloud, if you don’t exactly know where it’s residing or who has access to it? It becomes more of risk and it’s very difficult to start to apply policies to it, particularly with the maturity of cloud services. We occasionally see people who want to do it, but invariably they still need to keep the routing layer within the company.
Q What are the future plans for the company?
A Infrastructure is our core competency and we’ll be building up capabilities on that. Two years ago, we moved from being a software to an appliance-based company. We will be adding applications to that and extending our existing applications that sit on top of that infrastructure layer.
Q How did the recession affect the business?
A Eighteen months ago, companies wanted a two-three year ROI model. Today, they want a 12-month ROI. People are still spending money, but the ROI calculations have become more stringent.
