News

DYS Analytics Ports Enterprise E-mail Management Tool to Exchange

• By Stephen Swoyer
• October 16, 2002

The announcement last week at MEC 2002 marks DYS Analytics’ first foray into the Exchange market. For most of its existence, Email Control! has been available only for the Notes/Domino messaging environment, which is developed and marketed by IBM Corp.’s Lotus Software Group. According to director of marketing Dodie Bump, Email Control! currently enjoys sizeable market share in large Notes/Domino environments. All other things being equal, she anticipates that the product will spur similar uptick in Exchange shops.

“In the Lotus Notes/Domino space we have really owned that market segment. Today, we have a very large number of customers who are using our products in this world,” she says. “We are hoping that a lot of our customers who already have Domino and Exchange [in-house] will use [Email Control! for Exchange], as well as new customers with only Exchange.”

Email Control! facilitates aspects of Exchange administration – such as traffic analysis, monitoring, reporting and even cost allocations on a per-department basis -- that otherwise aren’t addressed by Microsoft’s Exchange management tool, the highly effective Exchange System Manager.

Among other essentials, Email Control! can provide a granular view – down to the message level – into Exchange traffic. “[It works] at the application level, how many messages are being sent, who’s sending the messages and to whom, and the average size of the message,” Bump says.

According to DYS Analytics, Email Control!’s real strength is as a tool for capacity planning. In this respect, argues Drew Wolff, DYS Analytics’ vice president of product marketing, Email Control! is a must-have tool for medium-sized or large organizations that are considering first-time Exchange implementations, Exchange 5.5 to Exchange 2000 migrations, or server consolidation.

“It can help you reduce your infrastructure and management costs, either by load balancing your servers or [by] helping you to better provision them for capacity. It can also help you to improve your service levels,” he says. “[A]ll of these [are important] if you want to consolidate servers, if you’re moving from Exchange 5.5 to Exchange 2000, for example.”

Email Control!’s reporting facility boasts more than 100 canned reports, as well as the ability to create custom reports. While canned reports are good enough for many shops, DYS Analytics’ Wolff confirms that most large organizations eventually create their own reports. “One of the things we’ve found is that while they like canned reports, they certainly want the ability to customize a lot of that, as well. I don’t think that we’ve sold to one larger organization that didn’t have a need for customization,” he says.

Email Control! also boasts a dedicated traffic analysis and reporting component – Email Reporter – that monitors messaging traffic and automatically dispatches an alert when it spots a potential problem.

Among other important features, Email Control! ships with an information portal that can be tailored according to the preferences of different kinds of users. Customers can also configure it to automatically generate and post reports to custom portals. This feature also can be customized according to the needs of different user groups. “The networking people would want to have a different view, a different perspective on what is valuable information to look at,” Bump says. “Through the portals, through our ability to create custom portals, you can deliver just the right information to different audiences.”

DYS Analytics positions Email Control! as a product for medium-sized or larger Exchange shops. “If you only have one server, I would recommend looking at some of the other tools that are out there, we really focus on some of the larger server environments,” Wolff says. “A lot of products … can give you … analysis of your e-mail system, and that’s wonderful if all you want to do is manage one or two servers, but they have difficulty scaling up when you’ve got several servers with thousands of users.”

According to Matt Cain, a senior vice president with consultancy Meta Group, there’s a perception in the market that Notes/Domino dominates in many high-end – 100,000 seat and larger – environments. But this isn’t the case, he says, because “clearly there are companies out there running 150,000 Exchange seats, and from a scalability point, there’s absolutely no difference between Exchange and Domino.”

Cain says that in large Notes/Domino and Exchange environments, especially, there’s a “thirst for patterns about message sizes, server utilization and bandwidth.“ In this regard, Cain expects that a product such as Email Control! can be an ROI boon for shops that are embarking on server consolidation efforts, especially.

“[I would use it] as part of a server consolidation effort, and I do believe that there’s payback in most efforts that yield server consolidation,” he says.