Is there still a market for Exchange alternatives?

By Richi Jennings (@richi ) - July 13, 2011.

Not so very long ago, there was a lot of talk in the market about Exchange alternatives -- software products that worked in a similar way to Microsoft Exchange. I was reminded of this by some news that crossed my desk yesterday. Is this still an interesting market, or is the battle long lost? Let's see, in The Long View...

The basic promise of these products was to glue the Outlook desktop client onto an alternative email/collaboration server -- i.e., not Exchange. The idea was that users wouldn't notice the difference (mostly), but the IT folks would get the benefit of using something that wasn't Exchange.

That was important for different reasons, depending on who you were; perhaps you felt that Exchange wasn't reliable enough, or didn't scale well, or simply that you preferred to run your servers on Unix or Linux.