Cisco buys Exchange-a-like vendor PostPath

Updated with more commentary 4.16pm UTC. Hello, Techmeme.

Suddenly, things are getting interesting again in the Exchange-alternatives market.

The quintessential growth-by-acquisition specialist, Cisco (CSCO), has just announced that it's acquiring PostPath.

Once again, Cisco makes a sound investment in an email technology vendor. Just like it did with IronPort. Great choice.

These are the clever guys who reverse-engineered the Exchange client protocol, MAPI/RPC, and the related on-the-wire details needed to make a vanilla install of Outlook talk to a non-Exchange mail server with full fidelity. Impressive stuff.

Despite Om Malik's analysis, this is quite a bit different from Zimbra.

Of all the other Exchange alternatives, PostPath has the most interesting architecture. And I say that as one who has years emotionally invested in the HP OpenMail technology ;-)

All the others rely on additional software on the desktop. In the case of OpenMail/SamsungContact/Scalix/Domino/etc., a MAPI service provider "plugin". Or, like Bynari/OpenXchange/etc., a separate app that synchronized an IMAP store with an Outlook.PST (personal store file).

I think Cisco fell out of love with Microsoft a while back. Something to do with VoIP support in Exchange and how Cisco thought it was Microsoft's partner but it turned out that Microsoft was competing with them. Nothing familiar there at all...

Sounds like Cisco wants to offer SaaS collaboration, based on PostPath and WebEx. Whoever said the email world has become dull and uninteresting?

Thanks to Jeff Brainard for the tip.

Confused About MAPI/RPC, the "Outlook-Exchange Transport Protocol"?

As David and I wrote earlier, Microsoft is now licensing the Outlook-Exchange Transport Protocol. I'm seeing a few people out there confuse this with MAPI. It's not, it's actually something related but different.

You see, MAPI isn't a protocol, it's an API. A protocol is "bits on the wire". An API is a programmatic interface (e.g. the calls implemented by a DLL or shared library).

The protocol is often known as MAPI/RPC (i.e. a remote-procedure-call encapsulation of MAPI -- although it's not as simple as that). Microsoft now has an official name for MAPI/RPC and now are licensing it.

Vendors using MAPI/RPC include:

• PostPath reverse-engineered it to create a Linux-based Exchange replacement
  
• Cemaphore licensed it to create a disaster recovery product
  

In OpenMail and Samsung Contact, we developed a MAPI service provider -- what some people call an "Outlook plugin". This basically translates the API calls made by Outlook into some other API (e.g. OpenMail's UAL or some standard like IMAP). OK, that's an over-simplification, but let's ignore that for now. Scalix continues with this OpenMail-inherited architecture, albeit much-enhanced.

Other vendors created an ugly hack that synchronized its server mail store with an Outlook personal store (PST) file. They'd run a task that would try to keep track of changes in one store and reflect them in the other. (Emphasis on the try, 'cos it didn't always work terrifically well ;-)