In the past, Calgah Computer Systems/Systemes Informatiques used to resell a messaging application called InterMail. But when InterMail’s owner got acquired, the product was no longer on the market. In a release, Raymond Calouche, Director at Calgah Computer Systems/Systemes Informatiques, said, “There was no support anymore, the new owner wanted to deal only with large installations for at least 10,000 seats. And most of our clients were looking for smaller-scale deployments.”

Calgah Computer Systems then decided to try out Microsoft (News - Alert) Exchange but were not impressed with the results as the company had problems in managing and operating the mail server. Calgah Computer Systems searched long and hard for a provider that was more suitable to their clients and finally decided to try IceWarp (News - Alert), as the company had a small server footprint, which meant that thousands of users could be hosted on a cost-effective hardware.

The other key factor that made IceWarp the ideal provider was its licensing model. Calouche went on to say that “While other vendors wanted to charge us by user count, IceWarp offered the unlimited license. That fits our model perfectly. We run four to five thousand users on one server and there is nothing sophisticated, they are just simple machines. I can download IceWarp’s latest release in fifteen seconds and the file fits into a small USB drive, with every module possible and all languages. Exchange is a totally different story - right now its basic version is hundreds of Megabytes in size up to over a Gigabyte.”

IceWarp also provides support to BlackBerry (News - Alert) and other mobile devices. Calouche said the “Cost of running a BlackBerry server on Exchange is tremendous, but for a while there were no other options. With IceWarp’s standards-based architecture and Active Sync, it doesn’t matter if you run BlackBerry, iPhone, or an Android (News - Alert) device. You choose what you want to use. It doesn’t matter if you are using a laptop, a desktop, or a tablet. If you don’t want to have a computer at all, it’s still fine: you can use the product entirely through a Web component. This is the strength of IceWarp.”