Global System Services Corporation (GSS) - The leading provider of email and messaging, directory services, and groupware consulting and professional services

Email is as essential for businesses communications as is the telephone. Unlike most telephones and the public telephone network, however, email programs and servers from different vendors commonly don't work together. Since the Internet has become email's public telephone network, email client applications and servers should be compatible with Internet standards. Unfortunately, for historical reasons, most corporate email systems are not based on Internet standards. However, in recent years, Internet standards have increasingly defined corporate email technology, and technologies are now available that enable companies to move beyond costly, proprietary systems.While proprietary systems are built on technologies owned and controlled by a single vendor, standards-based systems are built on technologies owned by no one and controlled by a standards development process open to all vendors. Although proprietary email systems have been successful in the past, most corporate CIOs and IT architects are now strategically committed to open standards-based technologies. Standards-based email systems facilitate interoperability among vendors, giving customers a wide and flexible choice of email client applications and servers.In the past, proprietary systems offered corporate customers security, more features and functionality, and the ability to rapidly develop new features; however, these advantages came at a price. LAN-based proprietary email systems, for example, were not scalable: Either they couldn't accommodate large numbers of users or the cost of monitoring and maintaining larger systems was prohibitively high. While in the past proprietary meant better security and more features, it also meant basic incompatibility with other proprietary systems. Incompatibility, in turn, meant a loss of security and message fidelity between systems, as well a proliferation of email gateways and their corresponding system-monitoring and maintenance challenges.Standards-based email technologies have been slower to evolve than proprietary systems, but they have deeper technological roots. Today, standards-based email systems deliver the advantages of proprietary systems without their drawbacks. As a result, vendors of proprietary email systems have rushed to extend their products to support open standards in addition to their own proprietary technologies. Although vendors of proprietary email systems originally resisted supporting Internet standards, they are now being forced to play catch-up having lost business to vendors offering standards- based products.While standards-based products make up the Internet and corporate Intranets, vendors of proprietary email systems have effectively 'bolted on' a series of add-ons that allow their products to incrementally approach the goal of interfacing with Internet standards - an inevitable approach but one with intrinsic drawbacks. The most obvious problem for vendors of proprietary email systems is the accelerating trend towards ever fatter, slower clients and resource-hungry servers. At the same time, an influx of new vendors offering standards-based products has accelerated the Internet standards development process, and these vendors are introducing new features and functionality at an unprecedented pace. This situation leaves vendors of proprietary systems one step behind in technology while their customers must pay more for email due to bloated infrastructure costs.