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Strategies & Market Trends : ZixIt Corporation (ZIXI) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: 10K a day who wrote (574)	11/11/1999 12:12:00 AM
From: BDR	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 4120

Raging Bull editorial/interview on another player, this one with a real product and clients: ragingbull.com Prepare for the impending death of paper-based business communication. Say goodbye to the overnight express delivery of sensitive documents. The inherent efficiencies of the Web and convenience and speed of e-mail are poised to eat "snail mail" for lunch. Just wait and see. When you really slice Tumbleweed Communications' (TMWD) business model down to the core, this is what Tumbleweed CEO and founder Jeff Smith one day hopes to achieve. In Smith's ideal world, secure e-mail messaging will soon displace voice and paper as the preferred method for businesses to communicate. Smith even believes that digital postage providers such as Stamps.com (STMP) and eStamps.com (ESTM) are only temporary transitional players in the document delivery game, since physical postage as we now know it will one day become largely obsolete. Thus, Smith is keenly positioning Tumbleweed to become the de facto platform and infrastructure provider for this nascent messaging market. Tumbleweed definitely thinks big. If outsourced e-mail providers like Mail.com (MAIL) and Critical Path (CPTH) are poised to evolve into the digital messengers of the next millennium, then Tumbleweed intends to become the virtual provider of digital postal trucks, mailing envelopes, and postage stamps. The company would in effect become the underlying central nervous system of secure messaging. Quite a lofty goal indeed. However, judging by the impressive partnerships and customer list the company has already amassed, Tumbleweed appears to have a shot at achieving that Herculean goal. Traditional packaging and delivery giants Pitney Bowes (PBI) and UPS (UPS), which is also an investor, both already utilize Tumbleweed's technology for their own online services. We recently sat down with Smith to discuss the future of electronic messaging, and the race to become the dominant secure messaging platform of the future.