Wednesday, August 18, 2010

What's Your Global Market Price?

"The United States has nothing to fear from commercial engagement with the rest of the planet."

Who said this?

Alexander Hamilton, the first Secretary of the Treasury of the United States, and probably the one individual most responsible for the financial and commercial system we have lived under for over 220 years. He went on to say, "The maxims of the United States have hitherto favored a free intercourse with all the worlds. They have conceived that they had nothing to fear from the unrestrained competition of commercial enterprise and have only desired to be admitted to it upon equal terms".

Interestingly, at the start of this United States, there was a fierce raging debate between the Federalists—George Washington, Hamilton, Adams, etc.—, and the Republicans—Jefferson, Madison, and later on Monroe—, on the kind of economic system we should have.

Jefferson, a quasi anarchist, who while in Washington's cabinet actually was a seditionist, met secretly with the French, behind Washington's back, to try and promote his various causes. Washington, always the statesman, tried to get Jefferson to work with the rest of his cabinet. The battle was so hostile that Jefferson later resigned from the cabinet. Jeffersonian doctrine basically held an anti-British tone, but more importantly, favored an agrarian's society (he was a large slave and land holder), versus Hamilton's manufacturing and commerce orientation.

So fierce was this divide that by 1804, while Jefferson was president, a succession and revolt from the union was being secretly plotted—by the North!

I give you this bit of history to point out an obvious fact. This is still the issue!

World Trade Contention Issues are About Your Salary

OK, you are tired of this bit of history, but if you look at the huge contentious issues of today these economic issues rule.

Global trade advocates WTO, IMF, etc., tell the various countries that they have to open up their markets to global price levels. Many of the developing nations are having a hard time with this concept. But let's take it a bit closer to home.

Home Depot announces the creation of ten thousand jobs—great news—with starting salaries at $7.00 to $20.00 an hour. The same basic price for workers in India and China—except that they are doing manufacturing to computer programming at those prices.

If you make $14, 560 a year from Wal-Mart or Home Depot, you are considered at the poverty level in the US. Yet this salary is a bonanza in many other parts of the world.

The discussion is that once China lets their currency float, their prices will go up ... but we think that is a false assumption. First, India and China still have massive unemployment and a huge poverty base. And there would be huge unrest in China (something to be avoiding at all costs) if more of these unemployed are not brought into the working world—at some level. In addition, there are still global labor markets that are still willing to work for less—Vietnam, Thailand, etc.

source
http://www.technologyevaluation.com/research/articles/what-s-your-global-market-price-17570

Sendmail Matures

Vendor Genesis

In 1981, Eric Allman developed sendmail to route messages between disparate mail systems. Two years later, in 1983, sendmail version 4.2 was shipping with 18 different vendor UNIX systems. The product was primarily "open-source" coding, which allowed system administrators to add whatever custom configurations deemed necessary. This "open-source" code allowed sendmail to gain a strong following, which has continued to the present day. In 1991, Eric Allman unified the sendmail development volunteers and released the enhanced version of sendmail via FTP in 1992. Six years later, in March of 1998, Eric Allman and Greg Olson formally launched Sendmail, Inc. The company is privately held. The company was successfully launched with $18M (USD) is venture capital funding. By the end of the 1999 fiscal year, Sendmail, Inc. had acquired 1600 new commercial clients, resulting in both strong product and services sales. In 1999 Sendmail, Inc derived 62% of its income from product sales, and 38% from services. From a channel perspective, 68% of Sendmail, Inc.'s sales were direct, the remaining 32% was derived through channel sales. Some of Sendmail, Inc.'s clients include AMD, Pfizer, Mail.com, Lucent, Nortel, GTE, Charles Schwab and many others.

Sendmail, Inc.'s business is based upon two key components, Mail Routing and Mail Hosting. Sendmail is available for all versions of UNIX and Microsoft Windows NT platforms and accounts for 75% of the Internet's Message Transfer Agents (MTA). In a corporate environment, sendmail typically resides in two areas: 1) behind the firewall routing Inbound and Outbound Internet mail between the primary mail servers, and 2) at the firewall to route mail over the Internet. The most commonly used mail servers interacting with sendmail in a corporate environment are Lotus Notes, Novell GroupWise and Microsoft Exchange.

Vendor Strategy and Trajectory

Sendmail is continuing to target corporate environments through implementation of complimentary message routing solutions to enhance the existing collaborative messaging environment. Over 50% of Sendmail Inc.'s new sales are generated from Fortune 5000 companies, with the remaining 40% emanating from ISPs and ASPs. Sendmail, Inc. will continue to develop its channel sales through existing partners such as Merisel as well as expanding its solution provider presence.

Sendmail is developing partnerships in the Unified Messaging arena to enable the company to continue its momentum in the collaborative corporate and Internet space, with some of its partners including Trend Micro, Brightmail, VSI and Messaging Direct. The components Sendmail is targeting include Content Management, Subscription Mailing Systems, Internet Document Management and Unified Messaging. We expect additional partners to be announced as part of Sendmail Inc.'s new product release and announcement scheduled for February 7th, along with increased sendmail functionality. Sendmail Inc. will continue to provide open-source code to the user community and will derive revenue from both commercially-enhanced products and commercial support and professional services for the commercial products. Support options can be obtained on an incremental or per issue basis, ranging from incident based support to enhanced on-site support, which has been particularly popular in the ISP space.

Vendor Strengths

Sendmail's strengths lie in its Message Routing and Message Hosting Services. Sendmail's reliability and security have become well known to network administrators over the last ten years. Sendmail's built in anti-spam features and enhanced security make sendmail an ideal choice as a mail routing agent between a corporate firewall and a collaborative messaging environment. The Sendmail for NT version offers the POP3 mail hosting capabilities that were acquired from Checkpoint, allowing both ISPs and corporations greater flexibility in mailbox implementations. The cost of Sendmail is extremely appealing with an Microsoft NT POP3 implementation of $4,995 (USD) for 5,000 mailboxes. The UNIX servers are priced competitively and processor based, with the first processor costing $895 (USD) and each additional costing approximately $395 (USD). Sendmail, Inc. has expanded its market by recognizing the need for NT based solutions and implementing it. Sendmail has also moved away from a strict command line interface (with the exception of open-source code) by providing a quick and simplified shrink-wrapped installation package.



source

http://www.technologyevaluation.com/research/articles/sendmail-matures-15180/