Language Support Added to NT-Based Web E-mail Server
Rockliffe Inc., a vendor of Web-based mail on a Windows NT/2000 Server, recently upgraded its product to support multiple languages.
MailSite 4.2 Express began shipping last month with support for Spanish, French, Chinese, German, Turkish, Bulgarian, Indonesian, and Portugese in addition to English.
"Some of the market predictions we’ve been given indicate the majority of the growth is going to be overseas in the messaging market over the next four years," says John Davies, CEO of Rockliffe (www.rockliffe.com). "If you think about how many e-mail addresses there are in the world today, how many of those are in the US.?"
Davies says that view represents the strategic perspective. "From an execution perspective, we’re responding to our customer demands. All of the languages we support today, we have customers that have asked for these languages," he says.
The company cites figures from research firm The Radicati Group Inc. (www.radicati.com) that places the value of the hosted mailbox market at $2.1 billion in 1999, growing to $6.3 billion by 2003.
Rockliffe targets its e-mail server software at service providers looking to offer free, Web-based e-mail, at customers interested in unified messaging approaches, and at enterprise customers interested in Web-based e-mail.
The company positions its software as being able to coexist on Windows with the many communications applications written for Windows, but with the scalability expected of Unix-based e-mail servers.
Advantages over Microsoft Exchange include a much smaller footprint, the ability to scale to hundreds of thousands of users on a single e-mail server, and a focus on browser-based access, Davies claims. Browser-based access was added in February. Previously the company required clients to use e-mail clients such as Eudora or Outlook Express.
Davies believes free e-mail run from a Windows NT/2000 Server will be attractive to ASPs and customers interested in unified messaging. "There’s a huge variety of tools and products available on the Windows platform to allow them to deliver and build customized messaging services, far more so than there is on the Unix platform," Davies says. "On the telephony side, there’s a lot more choice on the Windows platform than in Unix."
[TOC] Rockliffe adds language support to NT/2000 server-based Web e-mail server