Rockliffe Systems Inc. announced that Digex Inc. has standardized on its MailSite Internet mail server for all their Windows NT needs for at least the next year.

According to Rockliffe president John Davies, Digex (http://www.digex.net) spent six months evaluating every SMTP server package in sight, looking for a replacement for its NTMail servers.

“The reliability of that package wasn’t meeting their needs,” Davies said. And reliability was its No. 1 concern. Messages were getting lost, servers were going down and customers were complaining. “Many of these outsourcers are contracted to provide certain levels of reliability, and if they fall below that they have to pay penalties,” Davies said. So a lack or reliability has a very direct effect on revenue.

Right now, Digex hosts Web sites for companies such as Nike, Anheuser-Busch, Kraft Foods and Forbes, but some of those Web hosting customers are asking Digex to diversify into messaging server hosting. In the minds of customers, perhaps, one naturally follows the other.

But for the e-mail service provider, there are additional issues with items such as client software compatibility and end-user support.

Web users traditionally are more self-service than e-mail users. So when they reach a dead site, they just move on. But when e-mail users can’t exchange messages, they complain. Still, what makes Web hosting similar to e-mail outsourcing is the paying customer’s insistence on 100 percent uptime. Anheuser-Busch, for instance, relied on Digex to run the online portion of the Bud Bowl, a very high-profile event for the beermaker. Standard & Poor’s recently selected Digex to run its Web site. These are high-profile and public-facing sites, where service outages are highly likely to result in negative media coverage.

“The fact that they’re going to be standardizing all of their NT servers on MailSite is very big,” Davies said, adding that Digex currently has 600 NT servers in place, but current plans call for an expansion of that base to 2,000 servers. “This is going to have a big impact on our installed base as they move forward with this. They have very aggressive growth plans, and we’re going to be right there with them.”

Digex already has 50 MailSite servers in place. Once the massive rollout of hundreds of mail servers begins, Digex will become Rockliffe’s largest customer. As such, they will help set the course for future product developments, Davies said. He said that Rockliffe will remain focused on Windows NT messaging servers, but that leaves a lot of room for details such as Webmail, secure mail, electronic commerce, database integration and other messaging add-ons.

Already in the pipeline is MailSite version 3.3. The major enhancement in the new version is the inclusion of LDAP version 3. Davies said this allows entries to include both business information and personal information, and for the server operator to control access to the different levels of detail.

Electronic Mail & Messaging Systems, May 7, 1999