A New Era for Email Security Appliances?
Yesterday I saw an announcement that Trend Micro is going to cease selling the InterScan Messaging Security Appliance (IMSA), InterScan Web Security Appliance (IWSA), and InterScan Gateway Security Appliance (IGSA) in favor of software appliances and managed services. Pretty interesting development for such a major player to retreat from a hardware strategy but it is such a cluttered market with so many undifferentiated offerings that it must make business sense for them. If a Chinese company can’t make money selling hardware, where presumably labor and hardware costs are so much lower, then I think this a real harbinger for the industry.
Technorati Tags: trend micro, email security
MPP Available on DOD Emall
Our partner, Aglow Technologies, a Woman owned small business has successfully placed MPP on the Department of Defense Emall site. This means that anyone in the Department of Defense can enjoy the outstanding antispam protection of MPP and purchase with convenience of online access. Kudow’s to Aglow.
New Antispam Options for Mac OS X
I want to let you know that we have just released MPP with new antispam technology never before seen on the Mac platform. It is only available for Intel Mac’s (10.4 or 10.5) for now but it is significantly better than anything offered on Mac to date. Please check it out here
Protagon - Partner Update
I am pleased to announce the new web site of our Portuguese partner, Protagon. Looking for MPP in Brasil?
http://www.messagepartners.com.br/
MPP Community Edition?
We’ve been getting a few questions about MPP Community edition so I thought I would give you a brief update on the product. First of all, it is alive here and you can download here. It was unintentionally orphaned during the move of the web site to our new platform.
More importantly though, I want to explain what MPP Community is. MPP Community (aka MPP Free Edition) was released to build the MPP user base and name recognition. It represented the first version of our product but was scaled down to only support free content scanners - clamav and spamassassin. It is easier to use than some of the open source apps that do something similar, like amavisd, but it is more streamlined in functionality.
In reality, MPP Community has turned out to be a mixed blessing. We do have many people using it, but few are interested in becoming paying customers. Furthermore, MPP Community is soooooo much less interesting and powerful than MPP that people get the wrong idea about MPP itself. There is virtually no resemblance between MPP Community and our commercial product from the perspective of the GUI, functionality and more.
So for now we will keep MPP Community going with no changes and we will see what the future holds.
Thank you for your continued support.
New Web Home for MPP
Today we have launched a new web home for MPP, nextgen.messagepartners.com. Most pages from our existing site redirect here and we will do a complete cut over after we are sure that we have not left orphaned links. Our new site is based on Wordpress and has an entirely different look and feel. Wordpress is a cool platform and it is surprising how much can be done with a ‘blog’ platform. It certainly helps to have Prakash the web monster helping to figure all this stuff out, but it Wordpress is quite an incredible tool.
Enjoy and please don’t be shy with your feedback.
NY Giants Show the Way
If there is any truth to sports being a metaphor of life then the NY Giants Super Bowl victory should be an inspiration. The NY Giants were underdogs, under respected and basically counted out. They were expected to fall over to the almighty NY Patriots and drive them to their victory parties celebrating their perfect 19-0 season. But instead the Giants played their own game, stuck it out with incredible tenacity and gave all who watched the most exciting performance imaginable. They showed how much BS experts and expectations are and they proved with incredible drama the concept of team and self-determined destiny.
Technorati Tags: ny giants, superbowl
MPP Manager Released
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
Another Payday for Open Source
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 - The Year of Communications
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.