Scalix Releases Free E-mail/Calendaring Community Edition

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Scalix, a provider of Outlook-compatible e-mail and calendaring client and server software for the Linux platform, announced a new freeware version of its program, called Scalix Community Edition, yesterday at the LinuxWorld trade show in San Francisco. The move demonstrates that Scalix has come to the same conclusion many other software vendors have of late: The quickest way to boost an installed base and get word-of-mouth marketing and thereby improve the prospects for long-term success is to give its software away and then try to convert customers to a richer, for-fee version later.

According to Julie Hanna Farris, the company's founder and chief strategy officer, Scalix has been growing its installed base aggressively since it started shipping a commercialized version of its eponymous e-mail and calendaring software, Scalix Enterprise Edition, six quarters ago, and now boasts 160 enterprise clients and close to 50,000 seats (about half of those seats are replacing Exchange clients). Privately held Scalix has attracted $19.2 million in venture capital investments, and has opted for a very aggressive pricing and packaging strategy with its e-mail and calendaring products to shoot the gap between free but often cranky open source e-mail systems such as Sendmail and Postfix and more sophisticated and expensive commercialized messaging and groupware products such as IBM's Notes/Domino, Microsoft's Exchange, and Novell's GroupWise.

The Scalix product is based on Hewlett-Packard's OpenMail program, which HP created for its HP-UX Unix servers in the 1990s and killed off in early 2001. Farris created Scalix and licensed the program from HP, then put together a technical team to port the program to Linux and tune it to run and scale well on that platform--hence the company's name. The watershed event for Scalix came in June 2004, when the company announced Scalix 9.0 and delivered tight integration with Microsoft's Outlook 2003 and the open-source Ximian Evolution client. Scalix 9.0 also featured the Scalix Web Access client, which can be used to provide Webmail access from either Internet Explorer or Mozilla/Firefox browsers. Scalix had already supported earlier Outlook clients with its software, as well as Eudora, Entourage, Mozilla Mail, and the integrated mail features of BlackBerry handhelds. Scalix 9.0 was the first release of the software to support Novell's SUSE Linux; prior releases only ran on Red Hat Linux.

In October 2004, with the launch of Scalix 9.1, the company supported IBM's zSeries mainframes running Linux and upped the ante in support for Outlook clients with an implementation of Microsoft's native MAPI protocol in its Scalix Connect for Outlook client and the Scalix Server. According to Farris, other Linux-based e-mail and calendaring products convert from an IMAP, a messaging and calendaring protocol for Linux e-mail programs, to MAPI, the Windows API for e-mail and calendaring, and in some cases, Outlook functionality is diminished. As far as an Outlook client running in Windows is concerned, Scalix is Microsoft's Exchange Server, and it cannot tell the difference. And if you don't want to run Outlook, with Scalix 9.1, the company has created a Webmail client written in DHTML, XML, and SOAP that has no client-side programming at all and that, according to Hanna Farris, offers desktop-client grade functionality, including drop and drag functions (which are tricky to program into Web browser applications). Scalix Enterprise Edition costs $60 per seat, regardless of platform, and that is a stunningly low price and fair in that it is the same no matter what server the Linux is running on or how many Linux servers or partitions it takes to drive those e-mail and calendaring seats.

Getting the Scalix software to market is only half the battle, of course. And that is why at the end of June the company created Scalix Academic Edition, which was a freeware version of the Scalix Web Access client and a reduced-price version of the full Scalix suite for staff and faculty members at the institutions. This was not crippleware, and by giving the software away to academic institutions, Scalix was trying to go after a large population of budget-conscious organizations--colleges and universities are always looking for and getting handouts from IT vendors, and rightly so given the fact that students drive the next wave of technology adoption.

The advent of Scalix Community Edition this week takes the freeware idea to its logical conclusion--create a free version of the software for everyone--but Scalix has thus far not delivered an open source version of the program. Scalix may not be able to do this based on its licensing arrangements with HP, and even if it could--though it may be sacrilege to say so to Linux users--being open source is not necessarily a litmus test for contribution to the Linux community or to the larger IT community.

Many of its biggest clients to date have thousands of seats, and because of the lean-and-mean nature of the OpenMail program and the improvements that Scalix has made since it took over the program. In fact, says Hanna Farris, for basic e-mail and calendaring, Scalix can run on a smaller server and support more users than using Microsoft's Exchange. Hanna Farris boasts that the software is three to five times as scalable as alternatives, and that Scalix can support up to 5,000 seats on an entry X86 server while shops are hard-pressed to get 1,000 or 2,000 seats on a Notes/Domino or GroupWise setup on the same iron. And in many cases, because using Scalix does not require a long list of Microsoft middleware, the upfront and operating cost savings by using Scalix compared to Exchange can be quite substantial.

According Scalix, in one scenario where a customer were looking to move 1,800 seats off Exchange 5.5, it cost 76 percent less to get the hardware and software platform together behind the e-mail and calendaring server software for Scalix than for Exchange 2003; operating costs were 40 percent lower. These kind of numbers are one reason why IBM's Global Services unit has a partnership with Scalix to go after customers, and IBM's zSeries division is actively chasing Exchange 5.5 accounts with a mainframe consolidation offering that combines Linux on the mainframe with Scalix.

Of course, Scalix Community Edition makes the focus on numbers somewhat irrelevant--and in a good way. Scalix is not trying to go after high-end knowledge workers who have sophisticated groupware needs, but rather the vast market of regular workers who, mostly for reasons of economics, still do not have e-mail accounts. These are the people in governments, in retail stores, on shop floors, and in warehouses who do not always have immediate access to a computer, but who nonetheless need basic e-mail and calendaring to do their jobs better. But they don't have it yet. Basically, for the same price that you pay for e-mail from Google, Yahoo, or Microsoft MSN--meaning nadda, nothing, zilch, zip--companies can throw Scalix Community Edition on a server and deliver better functionality to those estranged employees. Moreover, small businesses on a tight budget who are just starting to build their businesses can give their employees Community Edition and then, when the need arises, move them up to Enterprise Edition.

"This is the world's best free-mail," says Hanna Farris, "and it is our long-term hope to become the standard for e-mail in the broader market." Her near-term goal is to be number one in e-mail and calendaring in the Linux market, and number two (behind Microsoft) in the overall market. As for the Community Edition, it is all of those estranged workers that has Hanna Farris excited. "This is a big green field opportunity for us."

Scalix Community Edition comes with the Scalix server for Linux, the Scalix Web Access Client with a personal calendar, and support for POP/IMAP clients. It also has a Web-based administration console, complete documentation, five Enterprise Edition seats for free (worth $300), and support through a forum and knowledge base. Scalix Enterprise Edition offers the full-function Outlook MAPI support as well as group calendaring and scheduling, which is a neat feature; this edition also supports wireless and PDA devices in a way that is agnostic about the devices and networks that link them to the server. Enterprise Edition also allows the clustering of multiple servers for scalability, the co-existence with actual Exchange Servers, and support through Scalix's technical support organization--all for $60 a seat.

RELATED STORIES

Scalix Ports Messaging Software to zSeries-Linux

Stratus, Scalix Join OSDL

Scalix Upgrades Linux-Based Groupware

Scalix Rakes in Another $6 Million in Venture Capital