Winners Circle: Software Companies to Watch
telecommagazine.com
Software.com (http://www.software.com)
If the $6.7-billion merger of @Home Network and Excite goes through, one thing the two companies will have in common are their e-mail platforms. Both companies last September selected Software.com's InterMail product to provide e-mail service to their users. Founded in 1993 with equity investments from Cisco and AT&T Ventures, Software.com bills itself as a developer of true carrier-scale electronic messaging software. Software.com's product is built with the philosophy that it must be able to support both an increasing number of users and message volume, and that e-mail not be lost in the event of a system failure or temporary Internet outage. The clients of this privately held company, which has headquarters in Santa Barbara, Calif., and Lexington, Mass., are literally a Who's Who of service providers and include such names as AT&T WorldNet Service, GTE, Bell Atlantic, MCI, Deutsche Telekom and KDD. The company claims to have licensed more than 25 million mailboxes worldwide--almost as many as market leader IBM Lotus Notes.
Software.com also has developed relationships with Hewlett-Packard and IBM. Last year, Hewlett-Packard selected InterMail as the application of choice for its high-performance servers targeted at service providers. Just months after HP signed an agreement, IBM entered into a worldwide licensing agreement that allows it to market, sell and deploy Software.com's products. Software.com is betting that the market for InterMail will grow as businesses opt to outsource their messaging requirements. |
