Mailing it on the head

Raja Simhan T.E.

IT is uncommon for a company with the suffix .com to not only survive but thrive in today's scenario. But Enmail.com has its reasons to retain the suffix. If it is succeeding now, then things can only get better, according to Karthik Iyer, Chief Executive Officer of the company.

Before founding Enmail.com, (an abbreviation of ''enadhu mail,'' meaning My Mail in Tamil) Karthik Iyer, a computer science graduate from the University of Minnesota, US, had worked with companies such as Unisys, General Mills, Affinitec and Staff Leasing. He also headed India's first company to develop indigenous technology for video-conferencing over TCP/IP networks.

Karthik Iyer's optimism stems from the fact that while the dotcom and the Internet bubble may have burst, e-mail is here to stay. E-mail today is one of the fastest means of sending messages, and his business - having waged its all on this technology facility - should grow by ''leaps and bounds'' if current trends are anything to go by.

He says, in the present depressed market, setting up an in-house e-mail management system, a must in today's Internet environment, is a costly proposition for a firm. And, to cut costs, companies would be forced to outsource their e-mail management system. Enmail.com is rightly positioned to offer such a cost-effective solution.

''Enmail.com is a dotcom for dotcoms. You may be a Web portal, an Internet service provider, a small or a large user of e-mail. We provide cost-effective solutions, and even customise according to requirement,'' he says.

In other words, a company need not invest its time and resources in managing e-mail inhouse. Rather, they can outsource the e-mail management to Enmail.com while attending to the core business, he says.

The Tamil Nadu Police, the Indian Navy, IIT-Madras and Gemini Communications, among others, have found faith in that statement - having outsourced their e-mail management to Enmail. For the Tamil Nadu Police, the messaging system covers the entire State.

Every day, on an average, about 1,000 messages are sent to each terminal and it is all routed through Enmail.com's server, he says. The messages could be from the Police headquarters to any of the police station terminals (some located at a remote place, or even in the forests - Karthik Iyer declines to reveal the location of the terminals citing confidentiality) and vice-versa.

''We provide outsourced (on the application service provider model) Internet e-mail services for businesses of all sizes, with a mandate to hide the complexities of technology and enable businesses to take advantage of the Internet,'' he says.

''Through our indigenously developed DC (distributed cluster) architecture, we provide scalability and reliability at one-fifth the cost of traditional large-scale e-mail systems,'' he adds.

''We started Enmail in March 2000, when the Net was coming down. We raised funds from Intel Capital, when the Internet bubble had already burst. And, today, we are not only surviving, but making money,'' he says, but declines to provide any numbers, citing his investors.

Enmail.com's offering is very simple, he says. ''When a company signs with us, they save substantially on hardware and software, its upgrades, hiring expensive administrators and related expenses.'' For a medium to a large firm, to have an in-house e-mail system in place, the overall cost could be around Rs 30 lakh. For a small firm, the cost should be a few lakh.

This includes having the basic infrastructure (mainly servers), hosting services, maintenance and manpower.

On the other hand, his company offers e-mails for around Rs 5,000 per year for five e-mail IDs. ''For a firm, there will be a cost saving of 50-80 per cent, compared to the already available system, by outsourcing e-mail management from us,'' he says.

Security is another issue that companies need to face. Companies need to have the latest technology and continuous monitoring to ensure that the systems are safe from attacks, including virus and hacking, he says.

''Every day, somebody tries to hack our system. However, our system is secured from external threats through a combination of technology and human efforts. This includes firewall, intrusion detection systems and close network monitoring round-the-clock, spam prevention and virus scanning of e-mail attachments.''

''We offer 99.99 per cent uptime guarantee. This means if all the three servers (two located in India and one in the US) fail at the same time, it takes only around six minutes for the servers to be back in action,'' he adds. On average, Enmail.com delivers around one lakh messages per week.

The average delivery time to any of the mail boxes around the world would be two minutes.

The small and medium-size companies are big customers. However, it takes a long time to educate these firms on the need to have a secure and reliable e-mail management system, he says.

''But, we are convinced that the SME segment is a big market for our solution. It will take some time to penetrate the sector,'' he adds.

On competition, Karthik Iyer says only US-based companies such as Criticalpath and USA.net offer services similar to Enmail.com. In India, as an extension, some of the hosting companies have started to offer e-mail management systems.

Pic.: Mr Karthik Iyer

Picture by Bijoy Ghosh

(raja@thehindu.co.in)