Ipswitch offers a range of products for messaging, file transfer, and network monitoring—including the IMail Server, which serves 60 million mailboxes worldwide.

by Jeff Goldman [October 13, 2004]

Ipswitch was founded in 1991 to develop software for the SMB space. Its products focus on three key areas: messaging, file transfer, and network monitoring. Mike Aalto, the company's Public Relations Manager, says the unifying factor between all of Ipswitch's products is ease of use. "They do what they're supposed to do," he says. "They don't have a lot of unnecessary complexity or cost."

The company has grown significantly in the years since it was founded, and now has distributors in 44 countries. While its products were initially developed for small to medium businesses, Aalto says they now reach other markets as well. "We do have reach into the enterprise space as well," he says.

Ipswitch (800) 793-4825

David Karp, Ipswitch's Senior Product Marketing Manager, says ISPs use the company's products in two ways. "An ISP might have hundreds of thousands of users, and thousands of devices in their network, but fundamentally be a company of 10 or 20 individuals," he says. "So a lot of our products appeal to the ISP's internal business needs—and Ipswitch products are also deployed by ISPs as part of their service offering."

Ipswitch's e-mail solution, the IMail Server, was first launched in 1995. At the time, Karp says, it was the first commercial e-mail server running on the Windows NT platform. The current release is a complete e-mail solution with anti-spam, anti-virus, and webmail.

Reliability and functionality
The company's strongest selling point, Karp says, is reliability. "There are about 60 million mailboxes out there relying on IMail Server, and the administrators will attest that they install it, they migrate or add their users, and it doesn't bother them much after that," he says. "If you're an ISP who's got 100,000 users and only five or ten employees, the last thing you need is a core service like e-mail giving you trouble."

The IMail Server comes with a basic webmail interface included. For a small fee, a more advanced solution called Killer Webmail adds additional functionality and customizability. "We provide as much of the desktop feel as we can without making it an overbearing download," Karp says. "It's got to be slim enough to work on slow connections."

The IMail Server product is available in two versions: IMail Server Small Business and IMail Server Professional. "From the ISP standpoint, you're really looking at the pro version, because it provides lots of multiple domains," Karp says. IMail Server Professional starts at $1,495 for unlimited users, or $1,940 with a service agreement.

Karp says a new Collaboration Suite will be released within the next few weeks, offering ISPs everything from e-mail to instant messaging to workgroup collaboration, as well as premium anti-virus and anti-spam solutions. "If you're running dedicated hosting for someone, you might well do this and really become their IT department as an ISP," he says.

Throughout the month of October, Ipswitch will be offering free Technology Focus seminars nationwide to introduce potential customers to the company's products.

Robust and secure
Julie Silverman is the Director of Network Operations for ACME Internet, an ISP and Web hosting company based in Minneapolis. ACME began looking for a new e-mail server in the late '90s after their previous solution failed them. "Our mail server got hijacked because we had no security," Silverman says. "We realized we had to pay for something a little bit more robust."

Silverman says the company chose IMail because of its broad functionality and ease of use. "We were looking for something that ran on a Windows Server platform, something that had the features that our users wanted, something that had SMTP security, and also something that was easy to administer—so our support people wouldn't have to be command line gurus to be able to go in and help our users," she says.

ACME Internet chose the Killer Webmail option rather than the basic package, Silverman says, because of the added functionality, both for the ISP and for the users. "It's not very expensive at all, and it allows us to customize how the webmail looks to our users," she says. "It also gives the end user the ability to change their own background color and font size."

The ISP has been working with Ipswitch for over five years now, and Silverman says she's happy that they switched when they did. Ongoing upgrades, she says, have been extremely affordable under the company's service agreement. "Once you invest in it, it's just a small amount of money to keep on going and have the latest and greatest," she says. .

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Online resource:
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