Scalix 10 Promises Enterprise-Ready Calendaring, E-Mail

Scalix 10 Promises Enterprise-Ready Calendaring, E-Mail
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Scalix and Open-Xchange announce new products at San Francisco's Open Source Business Conference.Scalix on Feb.14 at the Open Source Business Conference in San Francisco will announce the immediate availability of Scalix 10, its enterprise e-mail and calendaring solution on Linux.

Likewise, open-source collaboration software provider Open-Xchange will also announce at the show that its Service Pack 1 feature update for Open-Xchange Server 5 will be released in March.

Open-Xchange CEO Frank Hoberg said the update will bring more than 100 changes, all of which are designed to improve the products usability and integration capabilities.

For its part, Scalix 10 will be available in two versions: the advanced Enterprise Edition and the free, unlimited-use Community Edition. This is the eighth release of the product, which is based on Hewlett-Packards OpenMail technology.

Resource Library:

For an eWEEK Labs review of Scalix 9.2.1, click here.

"Scalix 10 is the most enterprise-ready release we have had so far, and many of its new features are designed to address larger-scale enterprise environments, from high-availability functionality to the interoperability issues that enterprises are dealing with," Julie Hanna Farris, founder and chief strategy officer of Scalix, based in San Mateo, Calif., told eWEEK in an interview.

The high-availability functionality of Scalix 10 is included in the Scalix Enterprise Edition, but not in the free Community version. That functionality leverages open-source and Linux clustering technology to automatically detect failed messaging services and reroute e-mail traffic to alternate servers, Farris said.

"We leverage the open-source clustering capabilities that come in Linux, with Red Hat and SUSE, so users dont have to have a unique proprietary way of doing high availability from a mail system. I can leverage the same clustering technology Im using for other Linux applications towards my e-mail system," she said.

Read more here about the first beta release of Microsoft Exchange "12."

There are several hundred customers currently using the enterprise version of the product—which Farris says translates into hundreds of thousands of seats—and the enterprise version is available for purchase at an initial perpetual license fee of $60 per user, rather than per mailbox, with an annual $12 annual update fee per user.

More than 10,000 organizations and companies are also using the free Community version. "Half of our customers have migrated off Exchange, while the rest have moved off IBMs Lotus Notes/Domino, Novells GroupWise, Sendmail and others, where they are looking to upgrade functionality. Our customer base and revenue grew more than 250 percent between 2004 and 2005, year on year, and we expect similar growth going into 2006," Farris said.

Scalix has also seen a large increase in partner numbers, which rose from 30 to 100 in the second half of 2005, she said.

Next Page: Scalix 10 and the "year of the calendar."

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