Assured: The Isode Blog

HP Integrity ISV Conference

I recently attended the HP Integrity ISV Conference in Cannes as Isode's Directory and Messaging software runs on HP-UX. They are now end of lifeing their True64 Mailbus 400 products and want to migrate these users to HP Integrity (Itanium CPU) running HP-UX and Isode M-Switch X.400 and M-Vault servers.

This event was organised by HP to get their ISV Vendors behind the Integrity Servers and ideally running HP-UX. HP clearly see Integrity as the area where they can add significant growth. The PC/x86 server market is pretty saturated and there will be the continuing battle with Dell on this front and as such margins get squeezed. Senior Intel executives were also there to promote their commitment to Itanium and showed the roadmap including the codenames of chips - "Tukwila" followed by "Poulson" and "Kitson". HP ended the conference by giving us their financials for 2007, $104B in revenue so if they are not selling servers that is an awful lot of printer ink.

Lemonade Interop, Munich

It's the second day of the Lemonade Interop in Munich. We've lost a client developer since yesterday, as as a result clients no longer outnumber servers - instead we're neck and neck, although this counts neither the several remote participants, nor the local presence of a mobile email service provider, Momail.

Interestingly, some of the very latest work is being actively implemented and deployed. For example, Philip van Hoof and I both have the QRESYNC extension for single-round-trip synchronization implemented in clients, and we've four servers to test against. It's impressive seeing a crowd of clients in the room implementing some of the most advanced tricks in the Lemonade book, not only forward-without-download, but CONDSTORE is now routine for advanced clients. I'm particularly struck by the immense progress that's been made since last year, and the increased interest from other client (and client framework) developers too.

Interesting, too, the discussions we've been having over technologies like CONVERT - which would provide the kinds of content conversion on demand that Momail are providing their customers automatically. We've a server implementation of it, now, and the lessons learned - and input from Momail - has been fascinating. NOTIFY, too, as well as the overall architecture of the "Push" email that's in demand from many people, has been carefully looked at.

We're coming to an end, as I type this, having overrun by a little while, but it's been a great time, and it clearly demonstrates that Lemonade is very close to widespread deployment.