Scalix Upgrades Eponymous Email Server and Client

Published: February 14, 2006

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Linux-based email and calendaring server provider Scalix is rolling out version 10 of its platform today, which company founder and chief strategy officer, Julie Hanna Ferris, bills as the most significant release of its product to date.

The Scalix product is a licensed version of Hewlett-Packard's OpenMail Unix mail server and client, which HP stopped selling and supporting years ago and which Scalix was founded to port to Linux and beef it up to shoot the gap between crufty email servers like Sendmail and over-the-top products like IBM's Notes/Domino and Microsoft's Outlook/Exchange. While Scalix cannot offer an open source version of the product--its license with HP prohibits it--the company last year did the next best thing and last year rolled out a Community Edition that is free to use and has nearly all of the features of the commercial product. And, at $60 per seat plus $12 per seat for an annual license to software updates, the Enterprise Edition, which has full support and full functionality, Scalix offers extremely good bang for the buck.

With Scalix 10, Hanna Farris says that her company is focusing on getting rid of some more pain points when it comes to Linux-based messaging. With Scalix 9, the company rolled out support for Linux running on IBM's mainframes and delivered the Scalix Web Access client, a homegrown Outlook-like client that runs in a Web browser and, as it turns out, is based on AJAX technologies. At the time, AJAX wasn't yet a nifty new thing with its own acronym, and Hanna Farris mumbled a very funny line about the computer industry and its propensity to, er, give old things new names and then call them hot, new technologies. AJAX is, of course, a mix DHTML, XML, and SOAP technologies, and the SWA client is interesting in that it does not require client-side programming. And with Scalix 9, the company implemented a native MAPI protocol in its Scalix Connect for Outlook client and the Scalix Server, which means Scalix does not do the IMAP-to-MAPI conversion, which always results in some feature or function being lost. As far as Outlook is concerned, Scalix is Exchange Server.

With Scalix 10, Scalix has added its own high availability clustering to the Scalix server, which can be implemented in an active-passive configuration, where a primary server has a hot backup, or in an active-active configuration, where two or more servers share the email load and when one of them dies for some reason, the other servers take over the load and the email just keeps rolling. This clustering support is built into the Scalix Enterprise Edition server and makes use of Red Hat Cluster Suite and Novell SUSE Heartbeat clustering services for those companies' respective Linuxes. To make life easier for customers, Scalix 10 also includes Apache 2.0, the Tomcat server, the Jakarta Java connector, and the Java Runtime Environment all bundled in, so you don't have to worry about the Linux distro having it. Scalix also says that it has better integration with Active Directory, and now supports 64-bit Red Hat and SUSE Linuxes as well. Scalix 10 also includes extended iCal support, which is Scalix shorthand for calendar interoperability, and moved beyond Outlook to the Novell Evolution client.

Hanna Farris says that business has picked up significantly for Scalix in the past year. The company saw 250 percent revenue and shipment growth in 2005, and had over 10,000 downloads of the Community Edition of its product, which Hanna Farris reckons accounts for hundreds of thousands of email and calendaring seats. The company now has a few hundred Enterprise Edition customers--about half coming from Exchange sites, with the remainder being a mix of Notes/Domino, GroupWise, and other stuff like Sendmail and SUSE's former Openexchange Server. A prominent U.S.-based networking giant (which Scalix cannot publicly name, but you know who they are) last year did a bake-off and decided to put Scalix on 4,000 seats, and then came back and doubled the order to 8,000 seats. Another prominent semiconductor manufacturer based in the same nation (again, think hard, and you have the name) is looking at putting in around the same number of seats, with Enterprise Edition seats except out on its factory shop floors, where it will be deploying Community Edition. The state of Massachusetts, which is big on open source these days, has deployed about the same number of seats in its trail courts and state police offices.