We warned you that PostPath was a company to watch for its Linux-based attack on Exchange. Earlier this month we profiled PostPath customer Globe Manufacturing. With Cisco’s announced acquisition of PostPath it has become obvious that Cisco intends to attack the UC market with a play straight from a Redmond playbook. First you launch a product that competes with your rival’s bread-and-butter and then you compete on price. PostPath bills itself as a drop-in alternative to Exchange. It allows users to continue using the Outlook client, but the back office server runs PostPath software on CentOS Linux.
Cisco plans to put the server in the cloud and sell an e-mail and calendaring service to its customers – this is perhaps Cisco’s first formal offering in the oh-so fashionable cloud computing space that pundits have been busy discussing, says our sister site Cisco Subnet. The software will be added to Cisco’s WebEx Connect collaboration platform, expanding WebEx’s software-as-a-service offerings, which include instant messaging, team spaces for collaboration, wikis and document sharing. See also: Cisco buys e-mail supplier for the cloud; goes head-to-head against Microsoft and Cisco still foggy about cloud services
BUT WAIT THERE’S MORE … Here’s an awesome podcast from LinuxWorld.com with a distinct open-source point of view. Author Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols, who recently wrote Can Open Source replace Microsoft Exchange? explains the technical and business rationale behind Cisco’s entry into the e-mail and groupware market. He says that Postpath promises to be not just easier to license, but less stressful on the hardware budget. (19:59)
Listen:
