Free, ad-supported email is making its way into the enterprise and challenging the stranglehold that Micrososft and IBM still have with Outlook/Exchange and Lotus Notes. Google is trying to push Gmail as an Outlook replacement, but many businesses don’t quite feel comfortable giving up their email servers just yet. An angel-backed startup called Unison Technologies is iaunching a beta on Tuesday of its powerful client-server communications software. It like a combination of Outlook and Skype, bringing together email, enterprise-wide instant messaging, and a VoIP gateway/phone messaging system.
Unison looks like Microsoft Outlook, complete with email, contacts, and calendar. It also has presence management through its own IM that can interoperate with Jabber, Gtalk, MSN MEssenger, and ICQ. And it acts as a PBX for VoIP phone systems, complete with follow-me phone numbers and the ability to pause calls on the desktop or switch them over to another phone. The phone system is also tied into the presence management so that when you pick up the phone, your status changes to “not available.” And you can listen to, save, or forward voicemails through the desktop software just as if they were emails. You can also record phone calls.
The software is not a Web app. Unison is a fat client-server app that works on Linux or Windows PCs. It took a 60-person team and more than $10 million to build.
The software comes in a free version that is currently sponsored by Ubuntu and Intermedia, but will contain dynamic ads in the future. Personal identifying information will be stripped out, but Unison will have the ability to target advertising by company and even by department. Companies can pay for an ad-free version, but they may not be so averse to a few ads in these trying times. The concept might be catching on. Another startup combining advertising and corporate email is WrapMail, which serves a company’s ads wrapped around each piece of outgoing email. (Watch WrapMail’s Elevator Pitch).
Here are some Unison screen shots with ads inserted for illustrative purposes, including the IT manager’s control panel:
“It took a 60-person team and more than $10 million to build.” Wow … it must be really, really good then.
I can understand the argument that many companies aren’t ready to give up their mail servers but does the world really need another desktop main client with no mac version?
IMO – email clients are as redundant floppy disks – some people still use ‘em while the rest of us just look on and shake our heads.
Another flop product from open community it’s just a copy of outlook.
Ad supported email is a bit of a joke, the conversion rate for ads in anything except search is amazingly low. Ads in email is equivalent to ads on facebook which currently are yielding 42c cpm’s for advertisers.
Anything built on email right now is like ancient technology, email is broken in most corporations and being used for the most ridiculous reasons. Like forwarding 10′s of MB attachments to hundreds of recipients. We need to focus on combining something like twitter+dropio+slideshare+flickr+shozu+youtube+blog+wiki
Right?
@Karl
Wrong? Karl, we have better than anecdotal evidence to the contrary that, email marketing and ‘ads’ within them do not produce results. Our clients experience a near 10% click rate on their Wraps, which if viewed through a direct mail lens, that rate is off the charts.
Further, we have launched a College Email Advertising Network where ads will be served in emails from/to college students. You can read more about it here:
http://wrapmail.wordpress.com/2008/09/11/millions-of-unused-ad-impressions-part-ii/
http://wrapmail.wordpress.com/2008/10/23/college-email-advertising-network-is-shaping-up/
Email is screaming for re-invention and it’s clear that there are a number of companies doing just that.
Dave Kustin – CMO, WrapMail
@Karl: Branding works and using external email to push out branding for once own company (not necessarily anyone else) seems to take advantage of converting all these emails to impressions. If they have build-in links that would be even better.
Gmail should be your outlook replacement. Use it for 2 days and you will see why.
I have almost NOTHING stored on my PC. Search, don’t sort. Get your domain set up a gmail for FREE.
You can have up to 50 different emails running of one hosted gmail…
Ummm, no thanks. When you have 50,000+ email users, GMAIL or anything web only where you don’t have full control over the server is not viable. Any IT director from a big size corporation will laugh at your face for even mentioning it.
I guess Intel, GE, Genentech, Salesforce, the City of Washington DC must have stupid IT directors.
http://www.google.com/apps/intl/en/business/customers.html
Search AND Sort would flip me to gmail permanently. Sort is the one thing missing from gmail.
Its heading in the right direction and it might actually work, a feature that Outlook seems to have missed.
I would rarter believe its a thunderbird ,evolution replacement and not a outlook replacement
Of course I should have started with Gmail and the Google reader, they are so part of my toolset now I forget about them.
Add on to that Google Apps, I’m collaborating on spreadsheets with people, working on business models on invite only pbwiki’s.
I just use GMail. Why the need to get more applications? Might as well just stick to something that is portable on the internet, while still well encrypted :)
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I think you guys should take a closer look, I checked out the demo and it’s a pretty nice product. The main point is that it unifies all email, IM and phone calls in to the one product, along with calendar and ties in your contacts as well.
Agreed, I Tried the demo and it is actually pretty cool! Looks like a tool that just lets you do your job.
Here is where I see this app can be better than outlook.
1.IM
2.VOIP.
3.SUPPORT FOR LINUX
4.Cost.
Here is how it can be better than gmail.
1.Local storage. i dont want to stay online to search the mails I received.
2.Customized for enterprise. I dont see gmail being very customizable (except for the themes). If these folks can give that flexiblity it will be a hit
3.integration with intranet portals and CRM solutions
If i was the product manager , i would rather try to replicate ZIMBRA than outlook and give it for many platforms
Not that I am a fan of Lotus Notes, but version 8 has the same features and more. The only difference is with Notes it does not include a PBX but does allow users to call via computer to computer. However, Unison looks like a lower cost solution for smaller businesses.
sigh, you can’t just use the client by itself. You have to use the server side component too.
How naive do you have to be to think that any serious commercial operation is going to hand it’s email over to Gmail??
I can’t believe my eyes! Not one but SEVERAL people have indicated that Gmail is “better” than client/server email system! Are they one drugs?
Think about it: a FREE email system that stores ALL your company’s email on THEIR network. Not only would most CEOs be promptly ejected from their posts by most shareholders if they tried that on, but in many jurisdictions around the world, doing so would put them in breach of corporation laws covering due diligence!
Until today, I thought most TC readers were coked-up teenagers. Now I know they are actually moronic coked-up teenagers.
Good Comment………….was thinking the same as I read these dumb posts about using gmail.
We use Scalix on several sites handling millions of emails with over 99% uptime over last 4 years. However I think we will trial this product simply because of the integrated voip features. The only big downside is a lack of web facing email access which imo is a bit of a killer tbh.
Alright, am I the only one who wants to know more about the cheeseburger incident?
Because the curiosity is really eating me now.
I don’t get why business still uses Outlook. Those licences are expensive, not to mention the always present problems with storage and email sizes.
Perhaps the credit crunch will concentrate their minds.
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why do you keep posting this crap here?
Our Email Center Pro product (http://www.emailcenterpro.com) takes a different approach to this challenge.
It’s a low-cost SaaS product for small businesses that makes it easy to manage, assign, and track email conversations with customers.
It looks and feels like web mail, not Outlook, and is packed with analytics and metrics tools for leveraging more of the metadata from email communications.
First month is free if anyone is interested. Lightweight CRM functionality is launching soon.
Is there no creativity left? I mean seriously this is a total knockoff of Outlook – the screen layout, the ribbon ui, the outlook bar on the left, the calendar view (including the rounded rects for appointments), the meeting scheduler.
I can’t believe Ubuntu put their name on this.
I wouldn’t be surprised if they get hit with an infringement lawsuit.
I use outlook constantly and love it for the most part (it is a bit of a resource hog), so I guess if you have to pick something to knockoff that would be it.
I think their ripping off Outlook is kind of the point. You don’t sell a product like this without winning over more than just IT people, if it feels familiar right out of the box, the obnoxious finance guy down the hall is less likely to complain.
Don’t people who read TC work in offices?
Comments like “This looks just like Outlook!” seem to indicate that the people that make them have never spent any time amongst 99% of all office workers who – like it or not – can barely use any software at all, least of all merrily skip from Outlook’s UI to another’s without major, corporation-busting pain.
This is the same reason why OpenOffice copies MS Office so closely – because trying to get office workers to use substantially different UI is total and utter suicide.
Yeah, I work in an office (although most of the people here know software pretty well) and I’m aware of what you’re saying.
I still think it’s quite annoying that all but the very best open source software (e.g. firefox) is simple knock-offs of what MS does.
Of course finding a way to be innovative in the UI space without having a horrific learning curve is a difficult problem and one that most companies aren’t capable of solving.
in this time who is willing to take a risk of setting up a new email client software and investing huge amount of money :)
I love the WrapMail idea – looks to be compatible with any email client. Looks like a letterhead for email where you promote your own products etc BUT without having to install anything or change email client/system.
Its a bit like Xobni, and it should be serverless then they have something.
It is always easier when you do not have to install anything on the desktop. To unseat Microsoft is no small task but then again combining email, calendar, IM, phone, sms etc in one tool seems like a very slick idea.
Whatever happened to Zimbra – the company that Yahoo bought a while back.? Wasn’ t that supposed to be the answer to Outlook? It has a web version that does most of what WrapMail does. It can leverage Yahoo chat and everything else in their product portfolio
Zimbra does not have a WrapMaker.
Zimbra does not wrap the emails in an interactive letterhead that contains images with embedded (to avoid the red x) links that promote the senders company (and sometimes could contain 3rd party ads if senders company is willing to have such and of course charge for it). WrapMail is not an email system (even though there is a web-based version for vertical markets) but rather a server-based tool to make every email deliver branding impressions and further report back who is where on the website and when (also available immediately)
REH/CEO WrapMail
Email apps are no more a pain point for most… Need to find a real problem and solve with so many heads and money
Email STILL hasn’t changed much in about 15 years. Still a clunky time synch, especially for group communicaitons.
We need a better option…
..oh, but wait, there’s SmartMessage Center from CircleUp! yes, it’s a shameless plug, sorry ;-)
This is Rurik Bradbury, CMO of Unison Technologies. I wanted to clarify a couple of points for some commenters above:
@Andy — the main ‘pain’ that Unison solves is on the server-side. MS Exchange is a very real pain-point for most IT departments. With Unison they can replace Exchange and reduce the time spent on server administration.
@Andrew — having a server side is the whole point. Unison consists of two parts: Unison Server and Unison Desktop. Both are required in order to do fully-unified communications (telephony, voicemail, email, IM) in one system. Exchange/Outlook cannot do this — because Outlook (even with nice add-ons like Xobni) is basically a front end for Exchange, and if Exchange cannot do unified communications, then naturally Outlook cannot either.
@Vengu — you are right about the advantages. In terms of Zimbra, we looked at doing a Web app for the front end, but found they are not yet powerful enough to do what we need: fully-integrate telephony, voicemail, email, IM etc into a seamless experience. That still requires a ‘fat’ client.
@Wessel — agreed. Microsoft Exchange/Outlook is extremely expensive. That is why companies should switch to Unison. (It’s better, faster, and free — what more could you ask for?)
Rurik – Thanks for your comments. The one issue I have with free these days is whether a business is sustainable with ad based model. You are targeting business users – showing ads while people are doing real work will result in low clicks and low conversion… what are your takes on that?
Andy – Unison is (currently) an on-premise solution, so our cost base is far lower than a Facebook or a MySpace which has huge bills for servers and power. The target audience for Unison is any office worker worldwide (ie hundreds of millions of seats) so we can service a large volume of users with little cost to us.
In terms of advertising, Unison can be very targeted (so charge higher CPMs), but without the privacy issues of Google Apps: we do NOT store or have access to a company’s content; and we do NOT have any personally identifiable information about users/companies. We just have generic but useful categories like company size, industry, and so on.
Last time I dealt with them a year or so ago, LinkedIn were charging more than $50 CPM for ads with this level of targeting.
Hoping for free, ad-supported desk top operating system, replacement for Windows….
The latest research (this week) from Forrester shows that emails between people that know each other is the most trusted source of information. Seems like an email is THE most ideal place for an ad.
Dave
CMO, WrapMail
I tried to access the site and got the following:
“Thank you for your interest in Unison. However, we have detected that you are located in one of the following countries or US states, where the use or sale of Unison software is prohibited:
Texas, Virginia, Wisconsin, Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Libya, Sudan, Syria, and any other jurisdiction to which US companies are restricted from exporting software.
If you are not in one of the territories above or believe this page to be an error, please e-mail us at info@unison.com ”
I am from Austin TX. Why would it be illegal to sell in Texas?
Jason, if you get an answer, please post it or forward it? Thanks. I couldn’t figure it out either.
maybe its texas in Iraq ? and I think Wisconsin is in pakistan, dunno where Virginia is tho
What I have been able to ascertain is that Texas passed some laws regarding displaying ads in software in a silly attempt to curb adware and spyware. So, since Unison delivers free software due to ads in the software, they will not release it to Texas residents. Of course there are always ways around it…
to dubbya b. Yes its texas in Iraq .. ;)
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Personal Information Management program that has been popular in the Linux world for a few years. It looks startlingly like Microsoft Outlook, and in fact is intended as a replacement for Outlook.
nice