Christine Herron is blogging from DEMOfall, where new technology is exhibited to a crowd of venture capitalists, journalists, entrepreneurs, and business executives. I was intrigued to read Christine’s description of PostPath, a Linux-based replacement for Microsoft Exchange server. After the onslaught of web-based Microsoft Office replacement wannabes, it’s nice to see a company aiming at the office software market from a different angle. With PostPath, the user’s desktop stays the same–Outlook still works, as do other client-side capabilities that rely on the Exchange back end. But companies win because they can move to a cheaper platform (Linux) and allegedly get better performance and failover capabilities too.
Postpath describes this as lean infrastructure: “high performance on lower cost hardware, using standard components and standard interfaces, and enabling management with standard tools.” I call it the work of the technology market in action. Maybe Microsoft doesn’t have a lock on office software.
