Azaleos CTO Talks E-mail Infrastructure

By Jeff Feinman

July 15, 2008 —  (Page 1 of 3)
Sending an e-mail is as easy as tapping a few keys and hitting the send button, but managing an e-mail infrastructure and making sure it runs smoothly is a much more complex affair.

That is the world in which Azaleos CTO Keith McCall has lived for many years. McCall honed a solid foundation of experience working as senior director for IBM Lotus and product unit manager at Microsoft for Exchange Solutions. He is credited for creating IBM’s Net.Commerce Internet commerce product, the 1996 Atlanta Olympic Games ticket server that sold tickets online and the Net.Data scripting language to create Web applications.

A native of Vancouver, Canada and graduate of the University of British Columbia, McCall got a taste of the U.S. East Coast working at IBM’s Massachusetts and New York offices. McCall returned near his home and founded Azaleos in 2004, and the Seattle company has approximately 50 employees. Azaleos focuses on e-mail infrastructure, and one of the company’s key goals is to offer a maintenance and management solution that simplifies Microsoft Exchange for IT, providing Exchange e-mail services to try to accomplish that.

Organizations need to monitor access directories and storage, look at changes in their network configurations and keep track of spam volumes. Securing access to e-mail is also a priority for IT organizations. With all these tasks, IT administrators and managers can get caught up in spending valuable time on e-mail infrastructure issues.

McCall noted a number of options for what to do when e-mail becomes too costly or complex. Organizations can consider an outsourcing service, host their e-mail infrastructure or consider managed services. McCall predicted that the use of outsourced e-mail will increase dramatically over the next four years or so. Outsourcing staffs can be located on premise or work remotely. Companies would turn to outsourcing services to fix e-mail so that their existing IT professionals can focus on more important business services.

McCall claimed that IT organizations spend less than 10 percent of their time thinking strategically about how to improve revenue and employee productivity, along with applications that drive revenue, and nearly 90 percent of the time on the maintenance of existing applications. He pointed out a February 2007 report by IDC titled “Enterprise Class Virtualization 2.0—Application Mobility, Recovery, and Management,” that states “US$8 is spent maintaining legacy IT for every $1 invested in new IT infrastructure; this severely limits business innovation.”

Related Search Term(s): E-mail, outsourcing, Azaleos

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