Messaging News - February 2009 - (Page 11)

IT shop—running everything VMware. It is really interesting.” on Keith R. Crosley, Director of Corporate Communications for Proofpoint, Inc. are using the Parallels platform, so we are talking to hosters about our offering. On the client side, Parallels is also often used for Mac software, because it allows you to run Windows on a Mac. They also have quite a bit of business for Parallels Virtuozzo, which is a competitor of VMware and Citrix Zen.” Parallels Virtuozzo Containers allows users to parcel up the operating system and hardware into virtualized ‘containers’ for efficient deployment and more energy-efficient use of resources. “The way it splits single operating systems across multiple virtual machines is unlike for example VMware, where each virtual machine has its own operating system. It is actually a slightly different take on virtualization,” explains Bradbury. Target Customer Is there a trend on who is buying virtual? “I do not think there is a strong trend there. It is pretty much across the board on all verticals and all company sizes,” responds Rao. Adds Crosley, “Going into virtualization, we thought this would be for a mid- to large-sized organization. But there are a lot of small guys—50-person organizations, with a two-person Unison also found SMB organizations tend to opt for virtualization. “We tend to define SMB broadly, 10 to 2000 seats,” says Bradbury. “Our sweet spot is probably 50 to 300 seats. I am surprised at the number of people that have heard of Unison in a relatively short time. We have about 6,000 companies testing Unison, most using the sponsored version. So that is a high uptake in a relatively short period.” Bradbury goes on to say his expectation is that virtualized UC will mostly be adopted by the Web hosting community, “If you are an IT manager inside a company you probably do not need multiple different unified communications servers, you just need one. We have had a lot of interest. The hosting industry is excited about the free licenses. They are used to paying what they see as being taxes on various pieces of software like Windows Server or Microsoft Exchange licenses, which can add up to a lot.” Recently, Ferris Research was commissioned by Unison to do a study on these costs. In The TCO of Microsoft UC, November 2008 the report found—assuming a company with 500 staff—that the total cost of Microsoft unified communications licenses over three years is $278,949 USD. According to Bradbury, given its target market, Microsoft has created a UC platform that takes a great deal of work to deploy. With multiple servers and server roles to set up across three different systems—Exchange Server 2007, Communications Server 2007, and Active Directory—it is not something that most SMBs can economically adopt. “Our focus is on the SMB range. Enterprises also tend to have a lot of complexity, historical legacy applications; it is difficult to bring a new solution to them. Instead, we are going for more of the open territory of the SMB-space.” For Spam Titan, it sees customers coming from three specific areas. Says Kavanagh, “Thirty-percent of our customers come from the people using managed mail product (ISPs that are Web hosting services in the cloud). This is a growing market space for us and we have made alterations to the product functionality for them. Seventypercent of our customers come from the SMB space, which for us is from 10 to 250 users. The third area is education, colleges, etc. While Spam Titan still offers its original product, the virtual side of the business is clearly dominating. “There is a strong appetite—60 percent of our customers using our product run in a virtual environment. We are seeing that percentage really grow over time. We are also seeing a growth in the SME space, there is a growing number adopting virtualization software, and therefore our product is growing with it.” Beyond TCO There are other reasons to like virtual beyond cost-savings. Unison has anti-spam, anti-virus, and other security features built in along with back up. “The goal is to have an IT person deploy just one single server and that is it for all communications,” says Bradbury. “Where as Microsoft makes you deploy seven or eight different servers and pay them a huge amount of money as well. Ours is really quite easy because it is just one server, as opposed to lots of data stores and different servers.” While this is a plus, it does force archiving to be well defined. “With Unison you really have to decide what your archive policy is, because it does email, it does IM, and phone calls. You could record every single conversation that goes through the organization, so there is a wide range of choices to be made.” While virtual environments are in many ways not different than physical ones, it does make some things easier. “Backup/restore and disaster recovery are a little easier, because there are great tools built into VMware to do that,” says Crosley. “Also, you can do fancy things like move a running image from one cluster to another.” Rao also notes that manageability is another driver for going virtual. “Besides the cost savings from going from physical to virtual, you have the ability to take snap shots and clone systems and move things messagingnews.com 11 http://www.messagingnews.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Messaging News - February 2009

Messaging News - February 2009 Contents Editor’s Note Short Takes Options Grow for Virtualized Environments Messaging Predictions for 2009 Moving Into the Cloud IBM Comes Out Swinging Next in Messaging News Learning to Do More with Less: An RSA Conference 2009 Preview “On Message” with Ben Gross The Web Has Shifted. Is Your Network Ready? Making the Case Learn More

Messaging News - February 2009

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