Most of us think of servers and cheap, plastic, laptops when we think of Dell. Perhaps we need to re-think this. Within a few years, Dell might be as synonymous with SaaS as Amazon and Salesforce.
Over the last year, Dell has been busy acquiring SaaS companies. One of the most interesting acquisitions is MessageOne, a company offering a diverse range of email services.
Since the this blog is all about email, let’s take a look at Dell’s SaaS offerings within an email context. A quick look at Dell’s page for Email Management Services shows that it is almost identical with MessageOne’s product line. Dell simply renamed the services and integrated them into a product line named ‘Email Management Services’. This services puts Dell in direct competition with Google (Postini), LiveOffice, Rackspace and countless others looking to take a bite out of this growing market.
So what is included in this new product line? Let’s find out.
Dell EMS Email Continuity
This is a rather interesting product. It acts as a stand-by email system that jumps in to save the day when your primary email system goes down. According to the product page, the transition happens completely seamlessly to the end-user.
We contacted Dell through e-mail and Twitter for more technical details, but at the time of this publication they have not replied. Just to speculate, it could work like this: you point your DNS to Dell’s servers. Assuming your servers are all up and running, they will simply forward the email to your server. If they are down, they will step in and act as a replacement server until your servers come back online. Once back online, the replacement servers will sync up the messages with the normal server and go back into stand-by mode.
The service integrates fully with Microsoft Exchange and Lotus Notes. While BlackBerry is mentioned multiple times in the service description, I had to dig all the way into the FAQ to find out if it works with BlackBerry Enterprise Server (BES). As it turns out, the service only works as long as the BES is up and running. It does not provide any continuity support for BES.
If I understand the service description properly, it does not work as a continuity solution for regular POP3/IMAP/SMTP setups, even though this would probably be less of a technical challenge.
Dell EMS Email Archive
Email Archiving is undoubtedly a hot space. With the combination of growing mailboxes and the usage of email as evidence in court, companies are starting to pay more attention to email archiving.
Unfortunately, Dell’s archiving tool only works with Microsoft Exchange, which limit its potential reach. It does come with a few great features though. For instance, according to the product description, by using compression and combining duplicate messages, Dell claims to be able to reduce the data store usage by up to 80%. (Although unless everyone at your company CCs the entire company in every mail, I’m sure that is a bit of a stretch.)
Contrary to many other email archiving services, Dell’s service does not remove the old messages from the local client (although a retention option is available). Instead it links up archived messages to the archive. In reality that means that when you access an old message, the back-end server will simply reach out to the archive and fetch it for you. That’s a neat feature. Since all messages are still accessible trough the regular interface, this also enables you to search through your entire archive with the built in search tool.
Details on how administrators can search the archive are few. Perhaps it relies on the built in features in Exchange.
Photo by Flickr user newmediarchitect
EMS Email Security
The last product in Dell’s Email Management Services is the spam and virus gateway. This product is very similar to many other services (such as Postini). Without a technical description of how the product works, I suppose you point your MX record to Dell’s servers. The servers will then only forward the clean emails to the company’s SMTP server.
Also worth noting is that the solution utilizes F-Secure as the virus scanner.
Are these products enough to make Dell the new leader in SaaS for email?
Probably not. Yet, we should not count them out. The above services are solid products used by Fortune 500 companies (even before Dell bought MessageOne). Given Dell’s size and resources, they could certainly take these products to the next level. The combination of these services makes the product-line complete (continuity+archiving+spam/virus filtering). The only thing that I think is holding the product line back is the focus on Microsoft Exchange. Needless to say, a lot of major companies are using Exchange, but far from all. Dell really needs to expand these products to work with other solutions as well (eg. Regular IMAP/POP3/SMTP and Zimbra).
