Need for An Alternative to Exchange

There is a need for an alternative to Exchange™. Despite the high market-share that Microsoft has secured for Exchange™, many organizations are beginning to understand the cost, challenge, and complexity of building, maintaining, and evolving an Exchange™-based infrastructure.

Indeed, as messaging and collaboration systems have grown in size and complexity, IT professionals have begun demanding:

Scalability and performance (fewer servers/more uses and data per server)
Backup/Restore that is simple, fast, and granular to the message level
Systems that are less vulnerable to viruses and other attacks
Better, more economical choices when it comes to archiving and virus filtration
Flexible and cost-effective mass storage options
Administration that approaches zero footprint, requiring fewer IT resources
Greater flexibility and innovation for new applications, whether AJAX web-clients, CalDAV open-standards clients, MTA-filters, etc.

However, because of the need for compatibility organizations have had no choice but to buy Exchange™, and then try and patch it with expensive software add-ons and by providing expensive server and (especially) expensive storage hardware and software. The resulting system can be fragile, needs ongoing administrative attention, is generally resistant to change, and typically requires substantial additional expenditure as time goes by.

Any competitive email solution has to fix these problems, but also to provide plug-compatibility to the rest of the email ecosystem since IT departments understand that their users will not tolerate changes to the desktop (no plug-ins) and require fully functional compatibility with Outlook™. The new system must be truly "drop-in."