Rockliffe's large-scale messaging

Large enterprises might want to check out Rockliffe's messaging products if they are looking to provide highly scalable and relatively inexpensive messaging capability for a large number of users.

Rockliffe is a supplier of e-mail servers and clients designed for small to large enterprises and ISPs. The San Jose company was founded in 1995 and delivered its first product, MailSite, in 1996.

MailSite comes in a variety of offerings aimed at several different markets. MailSite DataCenter is a high-performance, carrier-grade messaging system aimed primarily at ISPs and others that provide messaging and other functions to 100,000 or more users. DataCenter runs on Windows 2000 or NT and offers a highly scalable SQL-based directory system.

MailSite Enterprise is designed for large enterprises of 50,000 or more mailboxes (which can all be on one server) and offers support for a number of standards, including Lightweight Directory Access Protocol V3, Internet MessageAccess Protocol 4 (IMAP4), Post Office Protocol 3 (POP3) and Simple Mail Transfer Protocol. Enterprise offers administrators the ability to remotely administer the system using a variety of management consoles; it offers users the ability to perform some of their own administration tasks, and it supports any IMAP4- or POP3-based messaging client.

MailSite also comes in a several other versions designed for smaller organizations. MailSite Express, the application service provider-based Webmail client for the MailSite product line, is offered in 17 different languages.

Rockliffe also offers MochaMail, a feature-rich, Web-based messaging system that can run either with MailSite or with any other SMTP/IMAP4-based mail server. The MochaMail client requires a modestly configured client platform running Windows, Unix, Linux, MacOS or OS/2, as well as a Java-capable browser. MochaMail is designed to compete with Webmail systems but offers several enhancements over traditional Webmail. The MochaMail server can run on a variety of platforms, all of which can run in a single MochaMail implementation.

The Enterprise version of MailSite is priced at $3,995; that means for a 50,000-mailbox installation, the cost of the server and client (if MailSite Express is used) is $0.08 per mailbox, which compares quite favorably with other messaging systems.

Michael D. Osterman is the principal of Osterman Research, a market research firm that helps organizations understand the markets for messaging, directory and related products and services. He can be reached by clicking here.

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