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.