I just got back from the 2012 Sendmail Annual European Symposium in Frankfurt, Germany. This year’s event featured great customer presentations, partner workshops, and technical sessions. Glen Vondrick, Sendmail’s President and COO, kicked off the sessions with a look at Sendmail’s accomplishments since last year’s event and a look at where we are going.
Next up, Citigroup, which is celebrating their 200th birthday this year, gave a great presentation on how, as a digital bank, communications relies on the email backbone layer to be fast, resilient, reliable, and efficient and how the modernization of their messaging infrastructure was able to reduce their backbone from more than 100 servers in 5 layers to a single layer and a 10:1 server reduction.
The attendees were then brought through the migration of a major telecommunications industry enterprise email infrastructure from a mess of point products to a self-managed set of Sentrions in a hybrid private cloud environment, integrated with mailboxes living in the cloud and on-premises, all running under a single domain indentity.
The third customer presentation from arvato Systems, a provider of global consulting, system integration, and infrastructure services, took us through their modernization from 28 servers split between 4 layers running open source components. The modern infrastructure now takes advantage of their existing VMware services using Sentrion MPV and 3 Sentrion MP hard appliances. They are using Sentrions to provide this new mail security layer as a private cloud service to their internal customers.
Following the customer presentations, I brought the group through our work and plans for the latest application built on top of the Sentrion platform: Rogue Application Email Control. Rogue Email Application Control provides a fully automated solution to identify and control the communication flow of email-enabled application servers – reducing security risks, increasing value to individual lines–of–businesses, protecting brand reputation, all while reducing overall administrative costs. It enables mail administrators to discover, register, control, and monitor email enabled applications using their mail infrastructure.
We wrapped up the first day with an E-mail and the Cloud customer panel discussion featuring many of our customers who have already made the jump to a hybrid cloud and on-premises mail infrastructure. Through Q&A discussion, many useful lessons came out regarding what can and can’t be put in the cloud, potential future cloud product innovations, and the effects of the consumerization of IT and Bring-Your-Own-Device (BYOD). More details can be found in the live-tweet from the event mentioned below.
The second day began with workshops on three partner applications built on top of the Sentrion Applications Framework. First up, Totemo brought the attendees through the capabilities and a demo of the Totemo TrustMail application, which allows for client-less encryption and digital rights management using the recipient’s choice of S/MIME, OpenPGP, SSL/TLS, PDF-based encryption, or webmail delivery. In the second workshop, Image Analyzer described how illicit content in enterprise email can cause damage to brand & company reputation, company culture, and has legal liability. They demoed how the Image Analyzer application engine can be used to provide monitoring, user education, and enforcement of corporate acceptable use policies. The final partner workshop featured Trustsphere’s Logiq application that not only combats email false positives, spear phishing, and DDoS attacks, but also now features Enhanced Business Visibility to provide sales intelligence, operational intelligence, and the enterprise social graph to enhance decision making.
The day wrapped up with one last set of technical sessions from Sendmail’s Chris Meidinger and Kin Fung. Their sessions highlighted some of the new Sentrion MP 4.2 features and included a demo of the upcoming new Sendmail Quarantine. Chris showed off a new feature for enabling load balancers between email generating applications and sendmail MTAs while preserving the original source IP address of the application. Kin Fung gave the attendees a look at the Sentrion Apps SDK which enables building of applications on top of the Sentrion MP platform (such as the aforementioned partner applications). Kin then gave a demo of the new Sendmail Quarantine, currently under development, which replaces the existing end-user quarantine interface with a modern, flexible interface and has consolidated policy into the Sentrion MM policy engine. The new quarantine can support quarantining for different purposes beyond just spam (e.g., compliance, corporate governance, regulatory, etc).
As you can see, there was plenty of content and it was a jam packed two day event. However, at least for me, the best part was reconnecting with old friends (a.k.a., customers), meeting some of our new customers, and getting valuable feedback for existing and new products. I’m already looking forward to the next one. If you want to read more about what happened, I live-tweeted the event. Follow @GregShapiro and read all about it there.
