Last week Sendmail held the Western US Customer Advisory Board meeting in San Francisco, CA. These events are great opportunities for select enterprise customers to provide feedback to Sendmail on product directions, strategy, and share best practices information with their peers in other large enterprises. I was impressed with the passion Sendmail’s Sentrion customers such as Oracle, Wells Fargo, and Raytheon have for “doing it right” in regards to all matters concerned with optimizing message flow in and out of the enterprise. They confirmed the trends we have seen in the market for the growing importance of the on-premise message routing infrastructure while other aspects of the email topology seem be moving to the cloud (i.e. hygiene filtering and mailbox systems).
There is a fast growing awareness of the differentiation between products in the marketplace which were designed to filter/block mail (such as IronPort, Proofpoint, etc.) and the Sendmail Message Processor appliances which were designed to optimize delivery of important in-bound and outbound mail via policy-based complex routing. We are seeing more customers view the “anti-spam boxes” as commodity point solutions, necessary to protect the internet boundary, but ineffective when used for outbound message management or as SMTP email backbone solutions.
During the wrap-up session at the end of the day, the ultimate compliment to a solution provider was given us by our customers when they all gave us feedback that Sendmail listens and responds to user input. I believe all the Sendmail open source customers attending their first CAB event found this extremely valuable in their considerations to migrate to Sentrion solutions and modernize their messaging infrastructure. Sendmail has great loyal customers and it’s gratifying to know we are in synch with their plans.