If you want to measure the potential impact of Google beyond
search and advertising, you need look no farther than Cemaphore Systems, a San
Mateo, California startup led by Tyrone Pike, a successful serial entrepreneur.
Mr. Pike has built an email management system that uses Google’s massive
infrastructure to guarantee companies the reliability that even their own IT
departments and big names like IBM can’t match.
Mr. Pike’s original intention was not to compete with
Microsoft or anyone else with an email product. He set out to create a backup
system for corporate users of Microsoft Exchange that would take advantage of
Google’s giant server farms and its 99.99 percent uptime.
That alone is an important insight. While Google’s
domination in search is common knowledge and its ambition in applications has
been well documented, its most powerful weapon may well be the global
infrastructure it has created in its effort to push into “cloud computing.”
When Mr. Pike started to show his backup system to
companies, he found they were also interested in the standalone capabilities of
Cemaphore’s MailShadow. The product
synchronizes email, calendars and contacts between Outlook, Exchange, and
Gmail. Inadvertently, Mr. Pike had built
a path out of Microsoft Exchange for companies
that are worried about costs of maintaining Exchange and a shortage of
technical skills as the product has becomes more complex. More interestingly, even some large
enterprises have expressed an interest in his product.
Is Google aiming for the enterprise? “It’s the next opportunity
for them,” says Mr. Pike, pointing out that Google has the capacity to handle
hundreds of thousands, even millions of additional customers for its on-line applications
because of its vast back-end capacity.
As someone who is a business partner of both Microsoft and
Google, Mr. Pike finds himself in an awkward space. He originally thought of using
Google Mail as a “continuity solution,” for his large customers. In fact, the customers
were the ones who realized what they could do with his product and pressed him
on the migration issue. Now his web site touts the benefits of breaking away
from Microsoft Exchange (www.cemaphore.com).
Expect to see more companies build products that make use of
Google’s massive infrastructure. It frees them to create applications with the
secure knowledge that Google will handle the back end, on a scale that promises
to impress even the largest enterprises in the country.
Cemaphore has received around $29 million in funding in two
rounds from VCs including Mayfield, vSpring Capital of Salt Lake City, and
Worldview Technology Partners, which has offices in San Mateo, Tokyo and Roden,
Germany. The company is considering a $15 million mezzanine round.
MailShadow is in beta and will be rolled out in the third
quarter at $49.95 per user. Participants in the beta program now underway will
pay $29.95.