Email has rapidly become the mission-critical application for today’s businesses. And Mimosa Systems says it is revolutionizing email archiving with the industry’s most scalable grid architecture for Microsoft Exchange environments, scaling across hundreds of thousands of mailboxes. The company’s solution unifies content archiving, eDiscovery, disaster recovery, and business continuity in a single offering to meet the demands of today’s information-driven enterprise.

Here is our conversation with Bob Kruger, Senior Vice President of Engineering at Mimosa Systems. 

Microsoft Startup Zone: Building the Mimosa solution on the Microsoft platform was clearly a critical part of your business and technical strategy, can you elaborate?

Bob Kruger: It was an integral part of the company and product foundation, and it was done for both technical and pragmatic reasons. We’re in business to make money, right? So if you look at the marketplace, you look at the number of Exchange deployments, you look at the problems that people are having with storage costs, the need to do compliance work or discovery work, etc., it’s easy to see where the money is. And having something that's closely aligned with Microsoft technologies just made it that much easier and faster to implement — plus made it more reliable. And done properly, it also enables us to co-market with Microsoft, a good partnering opportunity.

From a technology standpoint, the great thing about Microsoft Windows environment is that it's well defined and very consistent, and we know that it's broadly deployed. From customer to customer, when we look at it — we know what it is. If somebody says we have a Windows Server 2003, and we're running Exchange 2007, and we're running SQL Server whichever version, then it's known to us, and we can immediately tell them how we perform in that environment. From the standpoint of implementing products, of course, if you know all that upfront, it's a lot easier.

This is a big difference from a Linux environment. If you're running Red Hat — you have to know which distribution, and which kernel are underneath. You start going through all the other open source pieces, or custom components, that people might have put into the product, and it's not as finished and/or polished. And then there's the messaging system itself, and what is it, and how does that integrate? That makes things very challenging.

MSUZ: So Microsoft Exchange was the most critical technology? What about other Microsoft technologies you used?

Kruger: Exchange is the foundation for sure. And the Windows Server platform to begin with, including Active Directory was important too. It provided us with a robust platform and the directory services we actively use.

MSUZ: What have been some of the quantifiable benefits?

Kruger: I’d say ease of use around deployment and manageability of the infrastructure come into play when I think about the directory services, for example. Just about everything is in one place. So between the user accounts, the server resources and machines, everything is there, so we don’t have to go to other places to get necessary information. If we didn’t have that, there would be a lot of work to do by hand and that takes longer and is fraught with errors.

MSUZ: What other technologies are you looking at for the future?

Kruger: We’re like a poster child for Microsoft technologies. We continue to keep pace with the Microsoft Management Console that makes life easier in terms of the creation of console snap-ins. We also use the Windows Presentation Foundation and the Windows Communications Foundation—those save us time as well in terms of providing remote capabilities for general presentation services. Having all of that is a big timesaver for us.

MSUZ: And we understand you are doing something different with your NearPoint solution — in terms of scalability and flexibility, can you elaborate?

Kruger: NearPoint is not just a product or a solution in and of itself. It's also a platform, a foundation for other solutions. We’re building our e-discovery and content monitoring, and other products, as solutions that leverage that foundation. That foundation itself is grid-based, meaning that multiple servers not only can be deployed but they can have different personalities. They can perform different tasks and distribute those tasks throughout the entire grid. If one fails, then another server would pick up its task. If the master that coordinates everything fails, then a peer would be promoted to master and take care of it. So in that way, we’re able to scale in a variety of directions. We can scale up or scale out — however the customer sees fit. And that's how we were able to tackle, by the way, a recent large customer win comprising the archiving of 150,000 mailboxes. A leading analyst group told us that there's only one other deployment out there in the industry that's larger than ours. We’re going to quickly — because of the grid architecture — reach unlimited scalability.

Bob Kruger's Background

Bob Kruger has over 30 years of experience in the high tech industry mainly in senior roles comprising software engineering and product management. Prior to Mimosa, he was senior vice president of engineering at Mendocino Software, a startup in the "continuous data protection" market. Before that, Kruger held CTO and SVP of Engineering roles at NDCHealth, Citrix Systems, and BMC Software. Prior to this, he worked at Microsoft for more than a decade. His last position with Microsoft was as the general manager of systems management products. Among other duties, he drove the creation of the Web-Based Enterprise Management and Common Information Model standards.

Earlier parts of Bob's high tech history began with Northern Telecom and the Commission on Professional and Hospital Activities. Bob was a major contributor and technical reviewer for Bill Gates' second book, Business @ the Speed of Thought, and a contributing author to Aspatore's book, Inside the Minds: Making Critical Technology Decisions. He is a graduate of the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA), with a degree in International Relations.

For more information, visit Mimosa Systems online, or read their Alum Interview "Where are They Now - Mimosa Revisited" or the success story "Mimosa Systems: Next-Gen Information Management."