Today, Sendmail officially opened the Sentrion App Store for business. The store is a one-stop shop for applications that plug into the Sentrion Message Processor (MP) line of appliances.

The Sentrion is unique in the marketplace because it is a technology platform for implementing your email backbone that supports many different applications. Like an iPhone™, you can extend the out-of-the-box functionality with plug-in applications. This distinguishes it from other email security appliances. In fact, it makes those appliances obsolete.

Where a company may invest in one solution to clean their inbound mail stream, another for preventing data leakage, another for in-line encryption and decryption, and yet another for high volume outbound bulk emailing. The Sentrion performs all those functions and more with plug-in applications.

The applications in the Sentrion App Store are organized into five categories:

• Compliance Policy — Apps to help enterprises stay in compliance with federal, state, and international laws and ensure employees comply with corporate email policies.
• Secure Content — Apps to help enterprises protect sensitive and confidential information by automatically securing data. These apps protect businesses without relying on end-users.
• Filtering — Apps that help enterprises stop 99.9+ percent of all unwanted email from reaching end-users and prevent 80 percent of it from ever touching the email infrastructure.
• Partner — Best-of-breed apps from Sendmail’s trusted partners “plug into” the Sentrion platform, helping enterprises handle messaging requirements ranging from compliance workflow to Instant Messaging.
• Community — Hundreds of user-developed and contributed apps are available through the standard Milter interface and can be certified on Sentrion.

With the technology platform approach to the email backbone. Many Sendmail customers have been able to realize tremendous cost savings and improved service and security of the email system. The App Store makes it easier to find specific solutions to problems and simplifies the process of acquiring those applications.

As we look back at 2009 and look ahead to 2010, there’s no denying that plenty of change is still in the air for IT professionals and corporations of all sizes.

With the recent rise in alternative communication methods and social networking services like Facebook and Twitter changing the way people communicate virtually, many people are now questioning whether email’s reign as king of communications will soon be over.

Additionally, as our economy hit a significant downturn in 2009, many businesses were prompted to look more closely at alternative IT solutions to reduce costs. The enterprise email market was not immune to this trend, and recent efforts to reduce messaging infrastructure costs have already impacted business decisions that will be made in the coming year.

With 2010 right around the corner, the Sendmail team has spent some time not only analyzing the enterprise email trends that occurred in 2009, but in a press release we issued today, we’ve also made some predictions about the market trends we see developing next year. We made these trend predictions mainly to help our customers gain a better understanding of how market changes are impacting the evolution of email, so they can make the best decisions for their businesses in 2010 in order to further reduce IT costs and modernize their messaging infrastructures.

So what are we predicting will happen in 2010?

Well, when we look into our crystal ball, we see that despite claims of increasing uses of social media networks are “killing the use of email,” we predict “email is far from dead.” Instead, we project that in 2010, and beyond, enterprise email will continue to remain a business-critical capability, and the dominate messaging tool used by enterprises throughout the world for secure and reliable business communications.

By looking into our crystal ball again, we also see much of the focus next year devoted to security and efficiency. In 2010, we predict the following enterprise email trends will be realized:

• Stronger demand for data loss prevention in US and EMEA markets
• Increased demand for cloud services, driven primarily by IT cost reductions
• Many more email services, such as bulk email delivery, will be brought in-house
• Virtualization will continue to grow significantly, fueled mainly by failover/disaster-recovery and server consolidation needs
• Increased encryption of sensitive data will be driven by regulatory requirements and stronger corporate security policies

So what do you think of our predictions for next year? Do you see these trends occurring in 2010, or does your crystal ball forecast something different? Please let us know – we’d love to hear your thoughts.

If you’re an enterprise company and your IT department is under pressure to reduce costs, then the Sendmail Messaging Architecture Program is something you’ll want to consider.

So far, over 250 Global 1000 enterprise companies have completed a Messaging Architecture Review with Sendmail. In doing so, each one has uncovered security vulnerabilities in their organization while discovering significant infrastructure cost reductions from modernizing their email messaging infrastructures. To date, this impressive list of customers includes:

• 7 of the world’s largest 10 financial services institutions
• 2 of the largest U.S. government agencies
• The world’s largest telecom and technology providers

In a nutshell, our Messaging Architecture Reviews consist of a thorough analysis of a company’s existing messaging infrastructure, and interviews with key departmental stakeholders who rely on email as a mission-critical communications function. Sendmail’s expert team of Messaging Architects conducts the reviews, and then presents the findings along with short and long-term recommendations on how to modernize their enterprise messaging infrastructure.

With this program, nearly 85% of enterprises are discovering security vulnerabilities and scalability flaws that threaten email trust and reliability within their organizations. While over 93% have also discovered significant cost savings that can be obtained from reallocation of existing budgets to combat threats by modernizing the way the messaging infrastructure manages email.

Although many of our customers participating in this program are surprised to learn they had so many ‘point products’ deployed that were actually hurting their ability to effectively manage growing email volumes, and creating more management complexity, they realized these reviews can help them gain valuable insight and further reduce operating expenses. By identifying their real costs and helping them discover vulnerabilities that can be remedied by using existing budgets, more and more Global 1000 are taking advantage of Sendmail’s unique messaging expertise, and utilizing our Messaging Architecture Reviews as a way to modernize their email messaging infrastructures and dramatically increase reliability and trust in email.

For more info on the program, check out http://sendmail.com/sm/services/email_architecture_review/

We had a great joint webcast last Thursday November 5th with Michael Osterman, president of Osterman Research, and Greg Olsen, director business development, Sendmail. By the number of registrations and turnout it appears that this is a very hot topic!
The webcast revealed data results from two recent studies, conducted by Osterman Research. Both studies underscored the idea that “security dominates the SaaS market today.” During the webcast, the speakers elaborated on what functions will most likely be outsourced in the future, noting basic email security functions such as, anti-spam, bulk email, anti-virus, and anti-malware as the most likely candidates.

Study Highlights

• 101 surveys completed in October 2009
• 40% of companies surveyed are outsourcing some part of their email infrastructure
• Anti-spam (64%) and bulk email (46%) are being outsourced by most companies
• Today:
  • 20% of users are served by a SaaS solution
  • 22% of email servers run as virtual servers
• In two years:
  • 38% of users will be served by a SaaS solution
  • 49% of email servers will run as virtual server

The great news for Sendmail customers is that we offer solutions across a broad spectrum of technologies. I believe we are the only vendor that offers messaging infrastructure on virtual appliances, blade servers, hard appliances and SaaS. This gives our customers tremendous flexibility in creating a highly efficient and secure infrastructure.

Check out the recorded version of the Webinar, including more highlights and results here: http://marketing.sendmail.com/CloudServices_Nov09Recording.html

Last week, I attended CAMP IT, an event designed to help businesses and IT benefit from virtualization strategies through successful management, security, and recovery practices.  I also had the opportunity to give a presentation tilted, “Unique Threats: How to Handle Unique Security Risks Posed by Virtualization.” During my presentation I shared best practices information with attendees regarding security threats posed by virtualization. Here are some examples of what I discussed:

• The Virtualization Movement: Jump on the bandwagon! Simple to deploy, inexpensive to manage, desktop development, quick deployments and more.
• Pros of Virtualization: Cost savings, disaster recovery, server consolidation, energy saving and many more.
• Cons of Virtualization: Patching management, application boundaries, high availability planning, liability issues and a few others to be aware of.
• Hidden costs: New and improved host servers, performance impact and personnel considerations.
• Unique Threats: Same threats to those as the physical environment, additional layers (13 patches since January 2009), theoretical rootkits, physical security and human error.
• Secure a virtual infrastructure: Use the principals of Information Security!

A key takeaway that I shared with the audience and that I’ll share with you is what’s the biggest security risk? It’s misconfiguration.  Overall, the audience seemed to appreciate the “things to think about before jumping in” points that I presented, so I am glad that was helpful.  Many people came up to me after the presentation and said they appreciated my candor.  They said that too many virtualization vendors were telling them how much money they had to invest in their infrastructure to realize long-term savings.  After all, what are they supposed to do with their existing investment in all their hardware?  It has to be depreciated over a five year term.  They can’t just throw it all away.

Look forward to future CAMP IT events and hope to see you there!

You may have seen the news, but we wanted to take one more opportunity to toot our own horn — Sentrion Virtual Message Processor (MPV) has achieved VMware Ready status after passing VMware’s evaluation and testing process.

What does this mean?  Only good things!  It means Sentrion MPV is compatible with VMware technology and ready for deployment in customer environments.  It means that Sentrion MPV can now be found within the online VMware Virtual Marketplace.  Oh, and it means cost savings for those enterprise organizations that are ready to invest in a modernized messaging infrastructure running in a virtual environment.  These seem like good things to me.

Check out the resource center for demos, webinars and data sheets for more detailed info on Sentrion MPV, widely recognized as the most sophisticated and flexible policy engine on the market, and how to reduce costs through server and application consolidation.  Okay, we’ll stop tooting now.

Lots of coffee was served to help with countering the effects of the previous nights bar session, surprisingly the alertness from the attendees was not diminished providing some good interactive dialogs! The demand for coffee finally lead to a request for some real European coffee – so a quick round of special orders was placed for freshly brewed cappuccinos and espressos.

Today’s customer presentation was from another Financial sector customer. They transitioned from Sendmail software to the full featured Sentrion platform. Their approach is a single layer approach which seems to work well for them. Their long term strategy is to benefit from cloud services where it makes sense to reduce cost but still maintain appropriate on-premise infrastructure for flexibility and control but at the same time be able to meet all regulatory compliance obligations with policy capabilities of the Sentrion. They see the Sentrion as the common platform that links all these services and provide a common platform to their archive systems, back end mailbox servers and also hosted gmail mailboxes.

Nick Filippi, Sendmail Director or Product Management, then gave a very good account of the Sendmail roadmap covering product releases that have come out since the last user group meeting and information on up coming product features for the Sentrion MP 4.x series. His talk reflected that Sendmail has listened to the customers wishes and they were in agreement with our Top 10 most important items to tackle this year. Some customers expressed the need for Sendmail to provide a smooth transition from the series 3 to the series 4 products, especially the migration of the TBIP feature.

The remainder of the session today was open discussion in these areas:

Quarantine – There seems to be the common agreement that large enterprises tend to not use quarantine to store spam or virus infected email. They prefer to reject the email rather than accepting it all. Not accepting the message provides benefits of not having to archive the spam, manage the quarantine and the related help desk support issue that comes with it. However the comments suggest that smaller organization are more in favor in using quarantine.  Of course Sentrion provides the functionality to reject and/or quarantine email per the customer requirements.

DKIM – A quick discussion on this subject concluded that everybody is waiting for more momentum to build with the uptake of DKIM. There is no real drive or budget allocation for projects in this area or it has little priority.

Outbound email – There was a consensus that there is an important need to control the various applications the produce email and marketing outbound email traffic within their organization. Most agree that there is no need for dedicated infrastructure for bulk mail but they are looking for ways to manage them. A shared infrastructure is the preferred approach to control cost and achieve better utilization of their backbone. There was a request for intelligent ways to recognize these traffic categories and prioritize their processing.

My next post will wrap up the London conference and then I’ll write a couple of blogs about how things went at the Berlin conference.

Throughout the day, Sendmail presented several topics aimed at enhancing our customers existing messaging infrastructure.  For example, Enterprise Management, Architectural Best Practices by Chris Meidinger, Nagios Monitoring by Christophe Wolfhugel, Hybrid Solutions – Cloud Services, Trends in secure messaging by yours truly.

The customer presentations together with the Sendmail presentations generated very interactive discussions during the first day. Many references were also made by customers regarding how valuable and important Sendmail’s professional services team is to the overall success and experience with their messaging projects. The liveliness of the attendees also showed throughout the day. This continued into the bar for the pre-dinner drinks. Yep – a lively group also translated into a nice big bill, but worth every penny.  There’s nothing better than having nice conversations “outside of work” to get to know your customers even better.

Next post I’ll get into more meat on some of the great presentations.

During the day, there were two customer presentations focusing on the challenges they had, the reason they choose Sendmail and their satisfaction level with the solution and professional services.

The first presenter had typical challenges of the financial sector where their business is made up of different business units that were constantly changing – growing, becoming smaller, sold, merged etc. They needed a routing and directory layer that would give them the flexibility to consolidate, manage and adapt to the constant changing needs. They chose Sendmail Sentrion because it is only solution that could help them with their requirements using the flexible Sentrion platform together with DirSync (Sendmail’s Directory Synchronization product). Our professional services was also able to provide great monitoring capabilities using Nagios to monitor their complex directories that now performed multi-directional synchronization with all their mission critical data sources. The secret sauce was definitely Sendmail’s DirSync solution for this customer.

Presenter two is one of the largest retails banks in the world with a customer base of over 350,000 customers globally. They were using open source before. They said they could not find anybody else in the market that could provide them with all the complex requirements that Sendmail could. This means a modern platform that fit into their virtualization strategy, Sendmail applications mapping into their application stack model, plus additional functionality in reserve to meet future needs of their user base. i.e., full directory needs and DLP applications while at the same not exceeding their current operation expenditure.
This customer was very happy with the record time in implementing such a large scale project.

More to come…

In today’s environment, not only must an email system do its job by routing adequately and efficiently our customers’ messages, but it must also come with a practical and widely accepted way for being monitored.

Sendmail’s approach in this is unique because not only can SNMP be used to query simple events from the Sentrion Appliances, but we also widely support another great tool for monitoring service platforms: Nagios.

This Open Source product gives a great flexibility in monitoring service platforms like our customer’s Core Mail Routing components running on Sentrion Appliances. This tool allows Sentrion to fetch complex information much easier which is useful for assessing a mail platform’s health – for example:

- get email traffic data, provide graphs & alerts
- monitor system components (hardware, operating system key values)
- group services and manage alerts at a cluster level rather than on
an individual basis.

The feedback from our customers at the recent European User Group encourages us to continue integrating Nagios with Sentrion and adding
new apps.  Not only do our customers like using Nagios as a tool, they like it so much that they even themselves extend its capabilities to add
nice Nagios extensions & monitor other service platforms with it.

If you have not looked at Nagios I encourage you to do so.