Internet Mail: A Change Of Course
Like two chameleons lying in an Internet mail-covered landscape, Lotus Notes and Microsoft Exchange will quickly begin to resemble the competition. Proprietary products wrapped in gateways will give way to native protocol support, and increasing emphasis will be put on scalability and reliability. At least, that's what several respected analysts, users and vendors predict as Internet mail encroaches on these marketplace leaders.

A range of factors underlies these forecasts: Internet mail providers are rapidly increasing the functionality of their products; thousands of users can be loaded on a single Internet mail server, reducing administrative overhead; many enterprises deploy Internet mail as a cost-effective approach for the bulk of their employees, while reserving products like Notes and Exchange for users with more specialized needs; and business messaging costs will be driven down by emerging outsourced services.

As of the first quarter of 1998, the Radicati Group estimated the Internet mail market at 10 million seats for Software.Com, 6.5 million for Netscape, 1.5 million for Sun Internet Mail, and 650,000 for ISOCOR ISOPLEX and 800,000 for NPLEX. That's about 20 million Internet mail seats, compared with an estimated 30.5 million seats for Notes and Exchange combined.

Many of these Internet mail seats reflect ISP e-mail service offerings. But that doesn't seem to bother most Internet mail providers, who predict the birth of a huge market in outsourced business-messaging based on new quality of service agreements. Sun officials predict that up to 50 percent of mid-tier companies will outsource mail within three years, while Netscape officials say it will be about three years before the majority of large enterprises do so. In fact, officials at both Netscape and Sun say ISPs using Internet mail will be able to knock total cost of ownership for mail systems down to as little as $30 per user per year, and corporations will get it down to about $60 within two or three years. Much of these savings stems directly from improved directory-based administration and the ability to load tens or hundreds of thousands of users on a single mail server.

Not surprisingly, Lotus and Microsoft disparage talk of Internet messaging encroachment. And many businesses and analysts want to know how Software.Com can claim a standards advantage over Notes and Exchange, when both those products already support just about every standard known to man. How can Netscape provide the kind of support enterprises expect? How can a latecomer like Sun, which began shipping product in November, take over a market that has been years in the making?

Internet messaging players respond that it's already apparent that when Microsoft and Lotus use gateways to support standards, their products take performance and reliability hits. Exchange, they say, has the further limitation of running only on NT. And while Notes is often credited for having the best workflow development environment in the industry, it takes heat from users who would prefer a more open platform that would let them integrate workflow with other non-Lotus corporate applications. Indeed, in the coming months, both Sun and Netscape are likely to announce development platforms based on HTML.

However, Internet players still have a few important vulnerabilities--but they're working on them. Netscape VP Korak Mitra says the number of people dedicated to tech support has quadrupled over the past year or so. Within six months, Mitra expects Netscape to have the right staffing levels for tech professional services and R&D support.

Moreover, when it comes to features and functionality, all Internet messaging players lag behind Lotus and Exchange, and analysts think that vendor predictions that they'll catch up by year's end are wishful thinking. But whether Internet messaging providers need to match functionality blow for blow with Notes and Exchange is an open question--especially for companies like Software.Com, Oracle and ISOCOR that put their marketing emphasis on building scalable, reliable systems for ISPs.

While both Sun and Netscape are targeting ISPs, they also have their sights set on large enterprises--where more than half of their customers also buy Notes or Exchange. Roger Nolan, group marketing manager for the Sun Internet Mail Server (SIMS), says SIMS' features let it root out spam before it's stored to disk. SIMS was also designed to provide a message store that doesn't require external storage. Apparently, Sun's estimated 1.5 million mail seats are already being loaded up on servers, with SBC Internet Services among Sun's new customers. SBC plans to serve some 300,000 e-mail clients on eight servers, although Sun says it can technically do so on one server.

Netscape's secret weapon lies with a project code-named Troopers ISP, whose goal is to bring management and storage of mail, in the form of IMAP, to the server in a way that scales. Mitra estimates that more than 75 percent of Netscape's current customers load 1,000 or more users on a single server. But Netscape is claiming a real breakthrough with Troopers, which it expects to be 10 times faster than current implementations. So, it is possible that up to 500,000 IMAP users could be supported on a single SPARC box. Netscape acquired the faster IMAP technology when it purchased Portola Communications about a year ago.

Mitra acknowledges that Notes still has the advantage with its development environment for workflow, but he says Netscape will have its own workflow products in the second half of this year--with the browser as the primary client. He also thinks Netscape's Calendar Server has an edge over Exchange because it works in real-time, and he suggests that Netscape's Collabra Server, for collaboration, is quite robust. Of course, one problem for business users is that they must either buy the entire SuiteSpot bundle (Collabra, Mail, Calendar and Web servers) or go ý la carte. Mitra says Netscape is now considering whether it wants to change its packaging.

Internet mail providers are confident, though, that standards-based, high-performance mail has a huge future as a service, especially among small and midsized companies.

What may be most important, though, is how quickly Internet messaging providers can attract third-party applications for collaboration and workflow to their platforms. "That's where we'll see the next quantum leap in collaborative technology," says Sara Radicati, president and CEO of The Radicati Group. It's pretty clear that platform will be HTML.