Hope on the E-mail Front

We introduce Postini, a suite of own-branded e-mail services for ISPs, priced on the pay-per-use ASP model.

by Gerry Blackwell
[November 20, 2000]

Internet access—actually connecting folks to the great internetwork—is a purely anonymous, transparent, and largely undifferentiated service. You're just another face in the crowd.

ISPs were once able to keep their brand in front of fickle customers by providing portal services. But that ground has long since been ceded to the Yahoos and Excites of the world.

Rawhide
So how can ISPs create and maintain brand awareness?

Through e-mail, says Postini Corp., a Redwood City California-based provider of value-added mail services for ISPs. At least your domain name is on customers' e-mail addresses, points out Postini founder and vice president of products Scott Petry. That's a start.

"There's a hell of a battle going on out there to return the customer to the ISP," Petry says. E-mail is one of the keys to winning it.

Postini currently offers three services: virus filtering, spam filtering, and wireless e-mail forwarding. Although there is some potential for direct revenue, the company is proposing that ISPs offer these services free to customers to increase loyalty and to reduce churn.

"Our mission is to allow e-mail service providers to deliver value-added applications more quickly," Petry says.

Not a conventional ASP
The company is neither an ISV nor, at least in its own view, a conventional ASP. It provides, says Petry, "inline infrastructure for processing e-mail messages on the fly." And it wants to be an aggregator of e-mail-related services for ISPs.

Postini has a platform into which it hopes ISVs will plug their applications. It launched an ISV partnering program earlier this year at ASPCon. Virus protection ISV Trend Micro Inc. of Cupertino, California is already on board. It provides the software for Postini's Virus Assistant service.

Competing spam and virus offerings tend to be server-side solutions that ISPs have to implement themselves on their own mail servers.

Given that mail servers must be up as close to 24x7 as possible, implementing new applications on a server is risky and disruptive, Petry argues. And for big companies like AOL with hundreds of mail servers in different places and from different vendors, it can be a potentially expensive and time-consuming proposition.

Postini's approach solves these problems, he says.

Deliver through DNS
To take advantage of the the company's services, ISPs simply redirect mail through DNS re-addressing—a nine-character change in network configuration software—to Postini's array of preprocessing servers housed at an Exodus data center in Santa Clara CA.

Using what Petry calls "industrial strength" technology—"dozens of Sun Solaris servers," load balancing software, etc.—Postini's system can handle millions of messages a day.

And the redirection does not delay message delivery. Latency is close to zero—in the order of 30 miliseconds per message, Petry says.

Although the company could provide dedicated infrastructure for large customers if they wanted it, this hasn't happened yet, Petry says. All of Postini's customers' traffic flows through the same system. It's what differentiates the company from a conventional ASP, he believes. When a message comes in, the system looks up the sender in a database to determine which services the ISP is providing for that customer. Then it "cracks open" the message on the fly and exposes it to the application or applications.

If there are no viruses, if the message is not spam and it doesn't need to be forwarded to a wireless device, Postini relays it on to the intended recipient's mail server as it was originally sent.

If it's virus-infected or junk mail, Postini stores it in quarantine and sends an e-mail to the recipient with a link to a Web site where they can view files and make choices on whether to receive them—disinfected in the case of viral messages, of course—or delete them.

The e-mail message and Web page are prime opportunities for ISPs to get their name in front of customers. The service is branded with the ISP's name not Postini's, Petry points out. "The user says, 'Wow, look what my ISP is doing for me.'"

Zero money down
The Postini offering involves zero capital costs for ISPs, no new infrastructure, no integration hassles. The small changes that need to be made to make the system work can be done in a matter of minutes based on a one-page list of instructions from Postini.

Petry is unwilling to say much about pricing, other than the fairly obvious—that its dependent on which services an ISP takes and for how many customers.

He points out, though, that the company's long-term plan is to build a portfolio of applications through partnering with ISVs. It isn't building a business entirely on revenues from these initial three applications. In other words, prices are reasonable—at least in Postini's view.

What will these services do for ISPs?

The company stresses the churn-reducing benefits and simplicity of the Postini architecture rather than the return on investment—although Petry notes that using Postini rather than implementing server-side solutions could help ISPs avoid adding expensive new technical staff.

He also won't say much about which applications will be added next, although the company has published a list of potential additions to the portfolio.

They include many that are messaging related—Internet fax, language translation, voice in e-mail, unified messaging—but some that are not, such as calendaring and scheduling, storage, archiving and even CRM and e-payment.

The company expects to launch the next new application—probably consumer- rather than business-oriented—early in the new year and then add new services on a quarterly basis after that.

With the recent addition to its client roster of LoadMail LLC, a Henderson Nevada-based Web messaging services provider with 400,000 users, Postini's total end customer base hit the two million mark.

Not bad for a company that only launched service in May.

The other major customer is Friendly Email Inc., with 500,000 users. Most others are the small local and regional players Postini targeted first. Now it's talking to the big boys, Petry says.

Bottom line
For ISPs that haven't already implemented server-side solutions for blocking junk mail and e-mail born viruses, Postini sounds like something worth checking out.

But ask about pricing before you go too far. The viability of the Postini proposition really hinges on the cost to the ISP.

—End

 

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