You may have seen the news yesterday about VMware announcing a Zimbra-based virtual email appliance. As a VMware partner who sells a VMware-based virtual appliance, I wondered how Sendmail fit into all of this. I asked Nickolas Filippi, our Director of Product Management, and he set me straight.
The Zimbra virtual email appliance provides mailboxes, calendaring, contact management and other end-user services which compete with Google Gmail, MS Exchange, and IBM Domino. Sendmail provides the infrastructure (email backbone) required to facilitate complex policy and routing requirements for enterprises. In other words, a Sendmail Sentrion Message Processor would sit on the internal email backbone and/or in the DMZ to handle the “heavy lifting” required for enterprise messaging infrastructures—things like gateway security management, outbound content filtering and much more. While Zimbra, or any of the other Groupware systems, handles mailboxes, end-user collaboration and email clients.
Sendmail is attending VMworld at the end of this month in San Francisco (booth # 940) and at that time we’ll have more to say about how Sendmail’s virtual messaging appliance (Sentrion MPV) fits in a Zimbra email environment. Stop by to say hello and learn more, and stay tuned to this blog.