by Carla Schroder
Managing Editor
Cisco’s impending PostPath acquistion is potentially a
bigger story than the tech press realizes, with the exception of
Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols, who wrote today’s R.I.P.
Exchange story:“Over the years, many of Microsoft monopolies have been
successfully attacked by open source: Linux on the server; Apache
for Web servers; Firefox for Web browsers; and so on. The one
exception, and it’s a big one, is business e-mail. Exchange, with
65% of the market, owns business groupware and
e-mail.”While the big Linux news revolves around the desktop wars, one of
the few remaining Redmond strongholds is the unholy MS
Exchange/Outlook duo. For whatever reason, despite their
innumerable defects, fragility, expense, cruddy performance, and
friendliness to malware, businesses are reluctant to give them up.
The two reasons I used to hear were the pain of migration, and
users don’t want to give up their Outlook. Migrating an existing
data store away from Exchange is very difficult- by design, of
course. (Why aren’t all these smart college-educated business types
asking themselves who owns their data?) But it can be done.Then along came PostPath, which thanks to some diligent
reverse-engineering became the first drop-in replacement for
Exchange that supported the super-secret proprietary Exchange
protocols. Based on Postfix and other FOSS applications, it seemed
the key to painless migration away from Exchange. But it didn’t
make much of a dent. So Cisco acquiring PostPath seemed like the
final piece: someone with the clout and expertise to be a genuine
“Exchange Killer.”But then SJVN reveals this:
“While Cisco is getting ready to smack Exchange around,
there’s another open-development that’s spelling trouble for
Exchange: OpenChange. This
project, which is being created in partnership with Samba, is
taking Exchange’s protocols, which the European Union forced
Microsoft to reveal, will enable any open-source groupware
developer to create an Exchange/Outlook compatible
server.”So PostPath’s reverse-engineering achievement doesn’t look like
such a big deal any more. Cisco’s own
news on the acquisition is sparse, but it seems to point to
SaaS (Software as a Service), rather than a customer-premise,
standalone messaging server:“With PostPath’s software, Cisco will extend the e-mail
and calendar functionality of its flexible software-as-a-service
(SaaS)-based collaborative platform that includes instant
messaging, voice, video, data, document management and Web 2.0
applications.”So now what? If Zimbra, Open-Xchange, PostPath, Scalix,
eGroupWare, phpGroupWare, and Citadel BBS aren’t good enough, then
what will it take? IBM is trying to recycle Lotus Notes as new and
cool. Ha! We do not forget that easily, Big Blue- Notes is
neither.Maybe the real message here isn’t that a better messaging server
is what’s needed, because there are plenty of those. Maybe the real
message is that anyone trying to make sense out of procurement
decisions is doomed to frustration.