Edsamail positioning itself as a managed messaging and storage service provider

Everything is a question of space. In places of work, it is always how big or how little space we have to move around, and be productive in. It is always putting things in their proper places, and how to "find space" or storage for things we accumulate in the office.

Before, we put everything of importance on paper. Our files, sensitive data, invoices, contracts are classified and arranged in our filing cabinets. When they are filled to bursting, we turned to computers to store data in.

But, like office space, computers and their disk spaces, can be just as limited. And it can be said that a company’s growth is directly proportional to its need for storage space. The bigger the company gets, the bigger its requirement for storage becomes.

Lucky for these firms, Internet service provider Edsamail is now expanding its services and positioning itself as a managed messaging and storage service provider which means providing facility where companies can purchase electronic space for their critical data.

Marco Urera, Edsamail’s chief executive officer, said at first, the decision to fashion Edsamail into a managed messaging facility was prompted by the need to satisfy the demands of their ever-growing subscribers (540,000 as of last count), for more sophisticated services like increased storage capacity as well as protection against viruses.

It was after deciding to procure from IBM an infrastructure for the storage facility, called the Enterprise Storage System, and realizing its vast potentials that Edsamail thought of expanding its consumer base to include businesses that are not necessarily its existing subscribers.

Backed up by IBM’s Enterprise Storage Server or "Shark," Edsamail is setting its sights on a big chunk of the Philippine and regional market that consists of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and the so-called brick-and-mortar companies, such as those in the pharmaceutical, food, health and consumer industries as well as accounting, real estate, financing and law firms whose mission-critical data serve as backbone of their operations.

"The Shark is a superior storage system. It is not just ordinary hard disk space. It is superior in the sense that it can handle data transfers at extremely fast speed. It handles multiple heterogeneous hosts, and allows what you call concurred users to be in the thousands and this thing will not slow down. And the system we have signed with IBM has no single point of failure, meaning if something goes down, there is always something that would take over immediately," Urera said.

Edsamail is aware that for it to become a viable provider of managed message and electronic storage system, it has to invest money in an infrastructure with the highest service level of availability (SLA). In information technology parlance, SLA indicates how long a system will function at peak performance until interrupted by outages.

With the Shark’s superior technical features, Edsamail is aiming for an SLA of 99.999 percent, a feat never before achieved by any business with a similar facility in the country.

With this level of SLA, chances of Edsamail’s storage system breaking down or going offline are almost nil. That’s because built into the system are duplications that ensure that if anything from wires to hard drives breaks down, a backup will automatically takes its place.

There are backups, and backups of the backups. And even backups of the double backups.

These multiple redundancies are what make Edsamail confident of hitting 99.999 percent uptime – the time the system remains operational a year. And a 99.999 percent uptime means there are only under five minutes in a year that the system will experience an outage or unscheduled downtime.

This performance level is important to Edsamail’s subscribers and target clients because if they are to get their critical data out of the office, a task called "outsourcing," they need the utmost assurance against data contamination, system hitches, and worst, data loss.

Aside from multiple redundancies, Shark has a capacity of up to 11.2 terabytes, big enough a storage space, perhaps for an electronic environment still governed by gigs and megs.

A system with this capacity carries a steep price tag. This explains why only major companies could afford it before, although the previous products yet lacked the technical safeguards and superior SLAs that the Shark has.

Now Edsamail is putting this facility within reach of middle strata industries by offering them portions of the system but with the safeguards and redundancies already thrown in. The company is taking a risk doing this, what with the economy still struggling on its feet and most businesses scaling on spending.

But Urera said there are positive indicators in the industry that give them the confidence to launch this project. Besides, he said Edsamail is riding on the trend nowadays among companies to outsource their data.

Boosting Edsamail’s confidence is IBM’s decision to go into a technical alliance in marketing the Shark. Such is IBM’s belief in its product that it agreed to co-brand the project and to go to market together with Edsamail.

Although work to put the infrastructure in place has begun, it would take another few months for the full product to hit the market. IBM and Edsamail will have to install the equipment and conduct a few rounds of tests and procedures, like simulating outages, before the Shark can be released into the corporate marketplace.

With Shark, Edsamail stands to be the pioneer MMSSP in the country and Singapore, and eventually, the entire Asian region. Urera said that as the IT industry becomes more sophisticated in its requirements, so does its needs for storage space. And the phenomenon is true not only in the country but abroad.

This is why in terms of returns on investment, Edsamail is aiming for revenues of about $40 million to $50 million in three years’ time, which, according to Urera, is a conservative estimate.

"The growth rate of servers, of companies which are buying servers just for storage, is big. Because the world is evolving, as they use more and more software applications, the demand for storage is growing," Urera said.

He added: "Outsource storage facilities are certainly an alternative that many are looking at. There are so many features that need more space. As the world matures, as it becomes more IT-savvy, it creates a natural demand for more hardware and infrastructure. We’re riding on this demand."