Mirapoint Announces WAPmail Appliance

Need to deploy wireless e-commerce (m-commerce) fast? Mirapoint has a single appliance that can simplify deployment.

by Alex Goldman
Associate Editor, ISP-Planet
[August 10, 2000]

Mirapoint's latest announcement builds on products covered in previous ISP Planet articles, such as its ISP program, MAPP (covered in "Point of Contact"). Their basic hardware was covered in the article "Turnkey ASP Functionality for ISPs". Previous products combined router and server functions on a single platform to speed mail delivery and facilitate the provision of value-added services such as virus scanning.

Mirapoint has always been a messaging and mail specialist — not a bad bet because the Internet was messages long before it also supported the Web, and, despite sophisticated graphics, much of the core of e-commerce is still messages, not images, not full-motion video.

The medium is messaging
The appliance is part of an any-message-anywhere strategy called Global Open Access. "The goal of our Global Open Access strategy is to empower users with fast and convenient access to messages regardless of the device or protocol being used," said Satish Ramachandran, chairman and CEO of Mirapoint.

The system synchronizes messages across various platforms, so that, for example, if you read an email using a PDA while on the road, that email will be available from your desktop computer and will be marked as "read" when you access it.

In addition, the software allows users to filter important messages into a folder called "wireless" which they can access while on the road, without downloading large or inconsequential messages. Almost all-in-one
Mirapoint claims its WAPmail servers will replace multiple hardware and software items with a single easy-to-install messaging server (everything except the WAP gateway).

The server will be easier to deploy and therefore faster-to-market than a more cumbersome product, and its simplicity also makes it easier to maintain. This simplicity should also make it cheaper in the long run, as lower maintenance costs cover potentially higher up-front prices.

Let form follow function
The system as demonstrated is very fast, and Mirapoint claimed that the speed was made possible by the fact that the system contains embedded support for WAP, and does not require protocol translation from IMAP or POP.

Mirapoint's proprietary messaging software also has a new release, Version 2.7.

New features in this release include:

• advanced messaging management functions for administering a cluster of Mirapoint servers and routers
• content filtering capabilities which allow administrators to reject or quarantine incoming messages based on the contents of a message
• Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) Transport Layer Security (TLS) for secure message transmission
• backup support using the Network Data Management Protocol (NDMP) standard
• user suspension services which allows service providers to suspend services for users without deleting their mailbox; and
• dynamic user move services which allows administrators to easily move users from one Mirapoint system to another for capacity planning purposes.

But the core of the new release is wireless.

—End