* Messaging Architects acquires NetMail and takes over the Hula project
Last week, Messaging Architects announced that it was acquiring Novell’s NetMail product and would also inherit leadership of Novell’s open source Hula project.
The week before, Messaging Architects announced M+Guardian, the company’s new secure e-mail gateway. A new version of NetMail is planned for release in September, incorporating such features as load balancing, application-level clustering and other features.
The NetMail/Hula announcement is important for a couple of reasons. First, NetMail is an established messaging and collaboration product that already has a large and well established base of users. Although there are a variety of newer and very good messaging and collaboration systems that are getting more press and are receiving a lot more attention, NetMail is a very good product in its own right and has lots more users than many of the sexier messaging and collaboration systems out there.
Second, Messaging Architects’ acquisition of NetMail, as well as their leadership of the Hula project, raises some interesting questions about the future of Novell’s other major messaging system, GroupWise.
GroupWise is a solid messaging system that has a number of strong features: it’s easy to manage; requires low labor investments to manage; and provides a strong feature set. However, it is marketed and supported less vigorously than many other messaging systems. Plus, while GroupWise represents a significant income stream for Novell, it’s not the biggest source of revenue for the company.
In short, is the NetMail sale the precursor to the sale of GroupWise to Messaging Architects or some other company? While I have no idea if this will happen or not, if it does happen it would be low on my list of surprising events for 2007.
