MPP and Beyond

It seems that most of the articles I read about the Trend vs. Barracuda suit miss or obscure the point so here is my attempt to explain it. Ironically, I discovered Trend’s patent a few years ago and showed it to our IP attorney who agreed that it is ridiculous and that most security vendors are exposed on this issue. Simply put, Trend has a ridiculous patent on the concept of scanning for viruses at the gateway - whether it be for email, FTP, www, etc. It is a broad system patent and should never have been granted in the first place.

Trend is suing Barracuda for the simple idea of scanning for viruses at the gateway. Since Barracuda uses ClamAV, owned by SourceFire, and ClamAV probably doesn’t have deep enough pockets to be interesting to sue, Trend sued Barracuda. Most commercial AV vendors have paid Trend to remove their liability but ClamAV never did. Plus, Barracuda has pissed off a lot of companies (i.e. Trend) for wrecking the low end of the antispam business with Walmart style pricing and a crap product, but that is a different story.

In any case, the central issue is the ridiculous gateway antivirus patent that Trend has. However, Barracuda seems to be in a race to be even more pathetic by trying to turn this into an open source issue with Barracuda as the great defenders of open source. That is a big joke. Barracuda is plenty rich, they have plenty of lawyers and they made a calculated risk to eek a few more dollars out with open source rather than paying some AV vendor a small per-box royalty. They wanted a disruption of the low end, they paid for the marketing to make it happen and they got it, but this is nobody’s issue but Barracuda.

Of course there is the larger issue of software patents but that is a fight far bigger than Trend and Barracuda and far beyond the scope of this rant. I say tough luck to Barracuda and thank goodness that we are too small to be on any radar screen for lawsuits.

Technorati Tags: trend micro, barracuda, antispam, email security, clamav, open source

Today we are pleased to announce the release of MPP Manager. MPP Manager is an integrate package with MPP Server, our web platform, MPP GUI, our GUI manager and qReview the manager of spam quarantines and email archives. While this culminates nearly a year of development it is also the first step towards making MPP easier to use, install and manage. It represents a big commitment to GUI controls and the first fruits of this focus. Look for many more refinements and enhancements in our GUI controls this year!

Thanks to all of you who helped so much in this effort!

Technorati Tags: MPP, email security, antispam, Message Partners, email archival

As we overhaul our web content we are also making some minor product name changes. It will take a while to have the changes permeate all of our literature but you will start to see the names on our more dynamic content.

MPP Core = MPP Enhanced Editoin
MPP Manager = qReview/MPP GUI
MPP Plug-In’s remain unchanged
MPP Community Edition = MPP Free Edition

The last 18 months has seen mega open source projects cashing in like crazy. Now it’s MySQL for 1 Billion. Who could believe it? It’s a great payday for their VC’s and the insiders, but is it good for the peons? Time will tell. All of the major projects related to MPP’s little view of the world are cashing out nicely - ClamAV, Zimbra, MySQL, etc. But who’s next? SpamAssassin was gone long ago, AmavisD is owned by a huge government backed research organization, Postfix is owned by IBM and the other projects that effect us are too broad to be sold, such as Boost. But hell, if you can get 1billion for these projects I can’t imagine that even IBM or the government of Slovenia would snub their noses at the idea of selling. There are no sacred cows in the open source business.

All this activity reverts to old ideas that I have blogged about - open source is a business model for the mega rich. The concept that there is a nice genius in his living room somewhere writing code that we can all use for free is a long dead myth. Certainly many great open source projects are free and help us all avoid buying software while solving problems, but this model is dying faster than HD DVD.

MySQL, company CEO Marten Mickos says that the deal is a huge win for open source. I ask, when will Benchmark Capital open source their bank account? I’ll be the first to download that!

Technorati Tags: mysql, sun, mpp, penthouse centerfold

2008 is the year of communications for Message Partners. The fact is that we have an ass-kicking product that is only getting better but we have done a crap job of telling the world about it. This year we will turn that around though.

2008 will be the year that MP goes Web 2.0. We are already migrating our site to a new, modern platform and coming up with new, interesting ways to convey our messages. We are ripping apart outdated and redundant information in our site and tech docs and consolidating them into our knowledgebase and a streamlined web site. These are only baby steps though, but they will lead us to our goal of clear, concise and compelling communications.

Any feedback you have is greatly appreciated.

Coming off of our best year ever, we have high hopes and strong plans for MPP in 2008. 2007 saw the achievement of key milestones for MPP. We had our biggest influx ever of new, major customers ever and we added key partners throughout the world. Our product development moved ahead on track - we saw the first fruits of an extensive development effort to unify our GUI interfaces, we launched a vastly improved email archival product and we delivered many behind the scenes improvements to our core code to make MPP more scalable, reliable and functional.

MPP does many things in many markets but our strengths and areas of focus are clearer than they ever have been.

• MPP is the premier product for service providers to provide value-driven email filtering and archival services. MPP provides the benefits of commercially supported software and leverages the best security components from both open source and commercial sources
• MPP provides a streamlined, web based email archival and compliance solution that is scalable and open.
• MPP is a software appliance that provides industry leading spam and virus protection for SMTP gateways and Unix based email servers. MPP is the boutique brand that outperforms even the largest competitors. No other product focuses on the SMTP relay like MPP.

In 2008 our primary goals are to develop new global and domestic channel partners, strengthen our archival and compliance offerings and enhance the scalability and functionality of our email filtering solution.

While other years have seen rapid releases of features in MPP core, we have slowed our feature development and focused core development on deep structural improvements to reach our goal of carrier class performance and reliability.

Beyond the core we are focusing on improving usability, installation, administration and internationalization for all of our GUI’s. MPP is an international product with international customers and it is a mandate in 2008 that all products can easily operate with international character sets and can be quickly translated. To this end all of our GUI tools will add functionality towards achieving this goal.

We think, in fact, we know, that 2008 will be an exciting year for MPP and we wish you all the same.

Technorati Tags: antispam, email service provider, email security, mpp