MessageOne Upgrades E-Mail Protection SystemMessageOne Upgrades E-Mail Protection System

It's been a perilous few months for E-mail administrators, but MessageOne Inc., a company co-founded by Adam Dell, brother of Dell CEO Michael Dell, is taking steps to make sure company E-mail systems aren't interrupted by system outages.

The latest version of MessageOne's backup E-mail offering, unveiled Tuesday, adds emergency notification, support of wireless devices, and full recovery support for IBM Lotus Notes. The company's service, called the Emergency Messaging System, provides a Linux-based backup E-mail system that can take over for any E-mail platform within 30 seconds of a primary system failure. The new emergency notification service, combined with the wireless-device support, lets the backup system automatically alert employees in emergency situations regardless of what device they're on, even using text-to-voice to alert employees using voice-only cell phones. The Notes support is designed to ensure that key compliance procedures aren't interrupted by E-mail outages.

In the past 60 days, E-mail administrators have been plagued by the Blaster and Sobig worms, a massive power outage that swept through the Midwest and Northeast, and a hurricane that knocked out systems along the mid-Atlantic coast--hence the increasing focus on E-mail continuity.

Mike Rosenfeld, MessageOne's VP of marketing, says the company's service is different from others because it manages E-mail backup at the application level, allowing companies to define replication parameters. So whereas other services automatically back up every piece of data in the E-mail system, MessageOne can be configured to backup individual types of data--such as contacts, calendars, directories, or in-boxes--at whatever frequency and as far back in time as a company wants. "We think about this as a life-support system," Rosenfeld says.

Pricing for Emergency Messaging System starts at $14,000 for an annual license for up to 1,000 seats. Pricing scales for larger deployments, with per-seat licenses as low as 50 cents a month.