Category Archives: Messaging

Mimecast Gets $62 Million for Email Archiving

Mimecast, a provider of cloud-based email archiving, security and continuity for Microsoft Exchange and Office 365, has today announced that it has secured $62.15 million in Series C funding led by Global Private Equity Firm Insight Venture Partners, with existing investors Dawn Capital also participating. Mimecast plans to use the funding to accelerate the development and deployment of new technology, and to support plans for rapid expansion in the U.S. market.

Founded in the U.K. in 2003 by Peter Bauer (CEO) and Neil Murray (CTO), Mimecast has grown rapidly, with over 50 percent year on year revenue growth recorded in six of the past nine years. Today, the Company has over 6,000 customers globally – including 70 percent of the U.K.’s top 100 law firms – and over 1.5 million users worldwide.

In addition to growing its existing business within the European, American and South African markets, Mimecast intends to use the investment to drive innovations in corporate email. The Company’s technology has already played an instrumental role in changing the way businesses deploy email; leading the transition from fragmented LAN-based infrastructures to a single platform cloud solution, Unified Email Management (UEM). Mimecast will now focus on continuing this evolution, using its Software-as-a-Service technology to create an Information Banking platform that allows businesses to unlock the inherent value stored within corporate email.

“Today’s businesses are as dependent on email as ever but, increasingly, email struggles to keep up as the way we create, store and share information changes,” Peter Bauer, CEO and co-founder, Mimecast. “At Mimecast, we believe email needs to be rewired if it is to continue to deliver real value to businesses. Building on our history of innovation, we are working to make email more collaborative and more interactive to realize the true value of the vast amount of unstructured data in email stores. We believe that the future is a more interactive archiving model, where IT folk and end users alike can derive more value in real time, on a day-to-day basis on any technology platform they choose to use. The cloud has the potential to democratize information management and deliver these kinds of powerful productivity tools to businesses of all sizes, rather than just being the preserve of the largest enterprises.”

“Email is the most important means of business communication and, better than anyone else, Mimecast delivers a true integrated solution for secure and accessible email,” said Jeff Lieberman, managing director, Insight Venture Partners. “Mimecast has already achieved strong success and with their product superiority, the industry’s move towards cloud solutions and a very large market opportunity, we believe that Mimecast is poised to achieve high growth and become the global leader in unified email management. Insight is delighted to share in this journey with management and existing shareholders.”


Gmail Support: When You Don’t Have Chat in Gmail

Image representing Gmail as depicted in CrunchBase

This is perhaps off topic but I wanted to post it for others to find when they have the same problem I did.

Problem: you can’t get chat to open in Gmail.

Even if the icon for it is showing, clicking it does nothing.

The icon, usually in the lower left of the page:

Google Chat Icon

 

 

Google the problem and the best you will come up with is this page, which was no help to me.

Solution: close and reopen gmail. Then click the icon. BTW that can fix a lot of problems in gmail or calendar. I find both  can responding after a few days of being open in Chrome for OS X.


ShoreTel Introduces Collaboration Solution

ShoreTel, a provider of premise and cloud-based business phone system and unified communications (UC), today announced the availability of collaboration applications to meet the demands of large enterprise customers deploying ShoreTel solutions around the world.

ShoreTel 12.3 supports 10,000 concurrent instant messaging clients, 1,000 audio conferencing ports and 500 Web conferencing ports. ShoreTel’s Linux based Service Appliance 400 enables tightly integrated collaboration services that are administrated by IT in ShoreTel Director and managed by the end user in ShoreTel Communicator.

ShoreTel is increasingly being selected by large global enterprises in more than 48 countries, which need to collaborate internally and externally on a massive scale – between departments or with customers, in any location.

“The SA-400 from a feature standpoint is simply amazing. Beyond the added capacity that comes with the new hardware the new feature set is so rich that it enables users to work in ways that were not possible before,” said Bakari Taylor, Systems Administrator at Current TV. “When we first received the new conference bridge we thought it was a standard upgrade, but to our surprise it was so much more. To put it simply the SA-400 is a game changer.”

Faster and more casual than email, IM is the new dial tone. And collaboration helps coworkers easily share ideas – avoiding lengthy games of phone and email tag, which create latency in productivity. With the new levels of concurrent client capabilities, employees can chat one-on-one or in groups. When instant messaging is not enough, users can easily turn an instant message into a video-enabled phone call at the touch of a button, and easily share their desktop with a single click.

ShoreTel Collaboration integrates with enterprise applications such as Microsoft Outlook, where appointments automatically configure voice and Web collaboration resources for both internal and external participants.

“We’re pleased to be selected by large enterprises that wish to provide applications for their employees, but without the cost of complexity of traditional premise or hosted services. By offering a single scalable platform that serves both midsize and large enterprises, we’re able to concentrate all efforts on making solutions brilliantly simple for users and administrators,” said Kevin Gavin, chief marketing officer at ShoreTel. “Like most UC vendors, we include collaboration tools with our UC platform. But it’s not an add-on or after thought; it’s functionally integrated into our system and end-users applications, with no more IT burden for deploying collaboration at the lowest cost for the organization.”