Is now the time to exchange Exchange?

Peter Judge ZDNet.co.uk

Published: 05 Sep 2002 14:50 BST

Most segments of the IT industry start out with lots of products, and then tend to settle down to just one or two leading players. Over the last few years, it has been pretty clear that "collaboration" products -- as we have learnt to call enterprise mail and calendaring servers -- are going that way. At times it has even looked as if Microsoft Exchange will ultimately have the field virtually to itself.

But in such a situation, it is possible for the main player to make a mistake and open the door to rivals. And it looks as if Microsoft might just have done this by tying the next version of Exchange (code-named Titanium) to the next version of Windows (aka .Net Server). Users like to hang on for a good while before making upgrades to servers or applications, and they certainly don't like doing both at once. But Microsoft has said that Titanium will be a .Net release, and will rely on server functions that will only be in .Net Server.

Others have already castigated Microsoft for this, but maybe there was no alternative. Perhaps Titanium really did need functions that won't be there till .Net Server. Whatever the reasoning, the double-upgrade threat will cause a lot of people to think twice about Exchange. Microsoft's continued manoeuvrings on licence structures will have the same effect.

So now is the time for collaboration rivals to get their knives out and start carving into Exchange's market. But who are these rivals? Lotus is the biggest competitor, of course. Being bought by IBM and getting Big Blue's weight behind it, both Notes and its Web-related Domino, gave it the shot in the arm it needed.

At the same time, Novell continues to place its best efforts in persuading users to move to Groupwise with all the usual ammunition of analyst reports and cost-of-ownership calculations. From all accounts, Groupwise is a fine product, but people shy away from it because of their uncertainties about Novell.

Oracle's announcement that it is to launch a collaboration product to rival Exchange this year met with universal scepticism. We have heard this before from Larry Ellison, who is forever coming up with Microsoft-beating plans which come to nothing before he retreats to the security of his enterprise financial and database products.