Mirapoint's latest product line features the flagship M4000 Message Server. Equipped with two 1.4 GHz Pentium III processors, and available in SAN-ready and NAS-ready versions, this messenger is faster than ever.

by Alex Goldman ISP-Planet Associate Editor [April 12, 2002]

Mirapoint shipped new multiprocessor versions of its messaging management devices.

But first, some background. Mirapoint was founded in 1997, when it proposed to dominate the messaging space with several million dollars of startup capital. Even the startup-friendly press assumed that the company, which was taking on giants like Sun and OpenWave, would fail. It did not.

Mirapoint proposes that its products replace what it calls "the old messaging approach" in which messaging is a part of the following network elements: mobile phones, Web services, voice mail gateways, wireless or WAP gateways, SMS/MMS gateways, Web servers (a.k.a. HTTP gateways), POP proxies, IMAP proxies, SMTP gateways, anti-virus products, directory servers, and high-end UNIX servers with Oracle databases.

Mirapoint argues that its group of seamlessly integrated messaging product makes deploying and managing a large messaging infrastructure much easier.

The new M4000 Message Server takes Mirapoint products to a new level of performance. Running on dual 1.4 GHz Pentium III processors with 2 GB of ECC SDRAM, the product features four redundant hot swap cooling fans and two hot swap power supplies. The M4000 can support proprietary Mirapoint failover cluster operation for an additional fee.

Ease of use: Mirapoint's monitoring client

For those with storage networks in place, the M4000s features a 64 bit optical host bus adapter for hooking up to your SAN, and the M4000n features two 10/100 BaseT Ethernet ports with an optional 1000BaseT (GigE) port for hooking up to a NAS.

With integrated wireless support, Mirapoint products are selling well in Asia and Europe. Mirapoint supports NTT's i-Mode protocol, and its products are used by China Telecom, by Cisco, by BMW's headquarters, and by Israel's two largest ISPs, the telco Bezeq and the largest independent, Zahav a.k.a. Internet Gold (zahav is Hebrew for "gold"). In the U.S., Mirapoint has had success with "super-regional" ISPs serving business clients, such as Pennsylvania's FASTNET and Indiana's SIGECOM.

Joe Hielscher, Mirapoint's vice president of marketing, is particularly pleased with SIGECOM's deployement. SIGECOM owns a 900 mile fiber network that passes about 100,000 homes and businesses in Evansville and Newburgh in Indiana. The company offers voice, Internet (and data), and cable television services.

The ISP's existing e-mail was prone to outages. The company decided to replace it when they found that their problem-ridden system would not be able to support Webmail, which SIGECOM saw as a key value-added service. After deploying Mirapoint, they were able to provide not only Webmail, but had wireless compatibility, and their system was stable.

"It's a classic case where an ISP that owns all the data relationships with the customer can use our multiservice single architecture solution to deploy additional services that simultaneously increase revenue per user and also increase customer stickiness," says Hielscher.

Hielscher is also proud of a recent deployment at Atlanta, Ga.-based ITC^Deltacom, who reduced the messaging support staff from four people to one after deploying the Mirapoint M4000 Message Server.

Ease of use: Mirapoint's domain manager

Customers pay for ease of management because ease of management translates directly into cost savings. The architecture is proprietary, but as long as it continues to do well in reliability and throughput tests, and as long as the software interface is easy use, the product will continue to sell.

Priced starting at $38,000, and rising rapidly as an ISP adds more boxes, the Mirapoint solution is not the cheapest available. Hielscher says the price of the product is no problem. "Companies uncertain about their ROI on our product can start with a speculative deployment. They can buy a single Mirapoint box for a premium POP location or a special business customer, and since the Mirapoint system scales, their investment is protected if they choose to expand their Mirapoint deployment. Once they see their total cost of ownership (TCO) go down, they'll be happy," he says.

In the future, Hielscher is watching the digital photography market closely. He believes that family photo albums and photos of business events are a potential revenue generator. He notes that one cell phone company in Japan, J-Phone, already has sold 4 million cell phone plus digital camera combination devices. J-Phone is using the photo service to distinguish itself from the AOL of Japanese mobile Internet access, NTT DoCoMo's i-Mode.

Wherever the future goes, Mirapoint aims to be there with a video-compatible device that's also comfortable with Kerberos, SMTP, SMS, HTTP, SSL, MIME, S/MIME, POP3, IMAP4, and almost any other protocol you'd care to name.

The only thing the company won't support is voice. "There are great manufacturers of voice gateways out there. Some of our competitors went into the voice market, and we watched them fail. We'd rather work with the voice gateway makers than work against them. We are able to keep our messaging architecture reliable because we've retained our focus. We're a messaging company. It's a huge market, and it's getting bigger. Businesses are beginning to realize how vital that market is. Look at AOL Time Warner which had to use a functioning mail system instead of their AOL mail system. It was embarrassing, but messaging is that important. You know what? We'd love to sell a system to AOL that would make their e-mail reliable."

The bottom line is that home-brewed messaging solutions don't scale. Hielscher believes that most companies will recognize that particular problem before they reach the 35 million user mark.

Meanwhile, J-Phone plans to launch phones that can send and receive 5 second video clips. Technology marches on.

—End