back to article Cisco and the war for, um, hosted email

Cisco Systems tossed itself into an increasingly contentious market last week with the debut of its very own hosted email service. Yes, contentious. Business email, so it seems, hasn't been interesting in an extremely long time. Like breathing — you rarely notice it unless it stops. But now its become a veritable clash of the …

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  1. jake Silver badge

    Too much technology, not enough techs.

    There are too many computer users, and not enough people who actually understand how computers work. Humanity hasn't grown along with it's technology. Scammers (and marketing folks ... same thing? You decide!) are separating fools from their money.

    I, me, personally, have had my "friends & family" email system up and running, non-stop, for over two decades. It is not exactly rocket science.

    Note that I said "system". When the Loma Prieta earthquake hit, my box under Bryant Street in Palo Alto lost power long enough to exhaust the UPS. New York took up the slack. When the 25th floor of the World Trade Center went away on 9/11, my server in a small closet at Sun went with it, but the Palo Alto server took up the slack. In both cases, servers in Edinburgh, Scotland, and Auckland, New Zealand did their job of mirroring the main servers. So did the small box at Great Aunt Mabel's, in Duluth, Minnesota (just in case). (The NYC server's replacement is currently housed in Nyack.)

    The system also runs Usenet, ftp, and Web servers. Maintenance takes (perhaps) 5 minutes a week, and most of that is clearing logs if nothing important seems to be happening.

    If I can do it for myself, on the cheap (under $150/year), why does the corporate world seem to think that basic connectivity has to be massively expensive, to the point of having to pay someone else to take care of it?

    The answer is that there is too much technology, and not enough techs ... and the fact that marketing rules the world (as seen by Management). Technology is a cost center, and marketing makes money. QED.

    Fortunately, some of us grok otherwise, and will continue to fan the "sometime less is more" flame ...

  2. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    WebEx

    The Problem is webex is rubbish, Its complicated to use as an in house Messenger service and Microsoft OCS runs a lot better for confrencing in

    Where most companys looks at Apples model and go wow thats simple, couple of clicks and you are done

    Cisco goes how can we make it more challenging to work with our product

  3. spencer
    WTF?

    Murkey Waters

    A lot of Cisco resellers (at least the ones that i can think of from the top of my head) also try and flog google services as well. I wonder if this will change anything.

  4. Gavin Hamill

    Postpath + Mac

    We bought the standalone Postpath product years ago and are still using it

    Their current version still has no Mac support (beyond IMAP) .. it emulates Exchange 2003, but does not emulate Outlook Web Access, so neither Entourage nor recent Mail.app can get full groupware functionality...

  5. Disco-Legend-Zeke
    Gates Halo

    Virtual everything.

    When I "invented" the Internet back in 1995, I provided all services from a single 90 MHz pentium. As demand increased, various aspects of ISPing were offloaded.

    The first to go was Email filtering as the levels of spam got beyond my native bandwidth, we became customer #67 (ISTR) of POSTINI.

    Then web hosting, DNS, and eventually the entire suite of Web Stuff migrated to external providers, or leased computers in a data center.

    Today our email is handled by www.FUSEMAIL.com, they offer services such as device syncing, mailing list management, and DNS. We rebrand it so that it still appears to the customer as if it were our own service. (Disclaimer: I am a happy customer of FuseMail, and have no sales or ownership position.)

    I host my own websites, but on a leased server in a Data center which costs less than my bandwidth did when i was doing it in house.

    For the big iron companies to join the move to cloud services is natural... But they have a good distance to go to catch up to the leaders. Even cloud pioneer Google chose to purchase Postini rather than attempt to start from scratch.

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