Part 2: Novell responds to Mirapoint 1 August, 2006 By Dave Chappelle

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"Mirapoint has not been on our radar; we stay focused on the two players ahead of us in the market: IBM Lotus Notes and MSFT Exchange," said Wendy Steinle, director, product marketing, GroupWise and OES.

"That's a position we've been in for some time and we don't see that changing. Our focus has helped our partner ecosystem become richer. We're seeing strength that growth in our partners as a result of our Linux focus. Our customers can do business when they need to from wherever they need to, as GroupWise Mobile Server delivers mobile connectivity on more devices and more device platforms than any competing solution."

By adding the SOAP protocol to GroupWise 7 Novell has enabled third parties to integrate with GroupWise, and that has made it easier for partners to build add-on solutions that complement GroupWise.

"Novell is very committed to the future of GroupWise, two of which are the announced roadmap with the next three releases," said Steinle.

"We've announced committed support through 2015, teaming, and real time collaboration; delivering security and reliable communications collaboration for our customers, not just e-mail."

Once aware of the Mirapoint, Steinle demonstrated what is sometimes a forgotten component of decision making: third party research.

"We check in with CERT, an independent third party, and it will return how many vulnerabilities have been reported for a particular software solution," she said Steinle.

"Today I typed Mirapoint and received 22 vulnerabilities, whereas GroupWise has 9. By comparison, Microsoft Exchange had 157."

In customer survey reports 87 per cent of GroupWise customers experienced no significant downtime and 52 per cent haven't had to reboot GroupWise in over six months.

"We know that the collaboration system is where an enormous amount of work gets done," Steinle said.

"It has to be reliable and have impeccable security. You can't open up your business to risk while shutting down progress. Security and reliability are imperative, and GroupWise delivers on those imperatives."

GroupWise has been designed to run on the leading operating systems, including Windows, Linux, and Netware Open Enterprise Server.

"Of course Linux is the fastest growing OS, so it's important that customers have the option of a world class ICE solution that runs on that open source OS and is coupled with global 24/7 support, which Novell delivers with GroupWise," said Steinle.

"Security, reliability, and flexibility are what customers are looking for. We're keeping our eye on the ball while delivering an outstanding collaboration solution that meets our customer's needs."