Mirapoint launches industry's most secure 'email in a box'

MIRAPOINT OFFERS INDUSTRY'S FIRST ALL-IN-ONE MESSAGING AND SECURITY APPLIANCE FOR SMALL TO MEDIUM BUSINESSES

Mirapoint, the secure messaging experts, has announced a new all-in-one appliance that serves, secures and manages email. Ideal for small to medium sized businesses, Mirapoint's M50 Message Server is the industry's first appliance to offer rich mail, calendaring, group scheduling and address book, coupled with integrated anti-virus and anti-spam functionality.

The SMB market is one of the largest horizontal markets, making up more than 70 percent of all businesses. According to Forrester Research, IT spending by small to medium businesses grew to $320 billion in 2004 and represents 44 percent of all U.S. IT spending. Furthermore, the complexity of providing email service has dramatically increased. Now, in addition to building a messaging nfrastructure that serves and manages millions of messages, network administrators must offer advanced services such as group calendaring, address book, web and wireless access, as well as securing the network from viruses, spam and hacker attacks.

Mirapoint's M50 appliance offers significant advantages for today's over-burdened IT departments - especially in small to medium businesses where resources need to be optimized.  In contrast to the ragmented, piece-meal approach that has evolved in many organisations over time, Mirapoint enables IT administrators to centralise messaging and block email-borne security threats in a single easy-to-manage appliance that requires virtually no maintenance.

"Building a secure messaging infrastructure is a complex task that drains the IT resources of many organisations, but it is especially painful for mid-sized organisations that have a multitude of IT projects demanding their attention and limited money and time to do it all," said Barry Ariko, chief executive officer for Mirapoint. "It became clear to us that by integrating both an email server and email security countermeasures in a single, easy-to-manage, highly reliable appliance, Mirapoint could effectively
address a serious pain point for network administrators in this market."

In addition to email messaging, the M50 provides all the features required for informal, easy-to-use group collaboration, including group calendaring and address book. Because the M50 has built-in native support for industry-standard protocols, it can integrate with any IMAP or POP client, including Microsoft Office, as well as mobile mail devices.  Thus, users have the option of viewing their messages with a client, such as Microsoft Outlook, or via Mirapoint's web-based interface.

The M50 also offers integrated anti-virus and anti-spam countermeasures that block upwards of 97 percent of incoming viruses and spam. According to research firm Radicati Group, in 2005, spam traffic will comprise 53 percent of corporate e-mail traffic. Worldwide virus traffic will reach about 900
million messages a day and 86 percent of viruses use email as a self-propagation medium.

"With the Mirapoint M50, IT departments, particularly in the SMB space, can now devote resources previously focused on email maintenance and administration to other more strategic or more pressing tasks," said Robert Mahowald, program director, Collaborative Computing at IDC. "Mirapoint has
consistently had the lowest TCO of email servers, and adding security features to the mix not only enhances product functionality but creates a greater ROI."

Mirapoint Message Servers offer the lowest total cost of ownership in application-based messaging products, generating huge cost savings in administration, management, and addition of new users. Bundling anti-virus and anti-spam features into the M50 Message Server results in an even greater cost savings and easier administration. Designed for the SMB market, the M50 serves 100-500 users and will be sold in 100 user bundles exclusively through Mirapoint channel partners.

"Until now, no messaging vendor has offered a single integrated email and security appliance to address small to medium businesses," said Graham Fox, managing director at Fresh Egg Network Technologies Ltd, a leading specialist security distributor based in Worthing, Sussex. "As the SMB market represents a fair portion of our business - and that of our VAR's - we see a large potential customer base for Mirapoint's unique single appliance approach that bundles both messaging and security countermeasures. Once again, Mirapoint are breaking ground with new and improved technology built around the needs of the market!"

Based on a hardened, purpose-built operating system with no known exploits, the M50 offers maximum security and all the patches, service packs and upgrade decisions that plague other approaches are eliminated. Mirapoint Message Servers have field-proven 99.999 percent reliability and require only a small percentage of the maintenance time other systems need. Many Mirapoint customers state that their Message Servers have simply never gone down. Currently in beta testing, the M50 will be available in December through Mirapoint's channel partners.