A startup founded by a former Citrix executive is aiming to help customers move Microsoft Exchange mailboxes to either Google Apps or Microsoft's own cloud.
Exoprise Systems, founded by Jason Lieblich, who was CTO of the virtualization and management division of Citrix for three years until 2009, launched out of stealth mode this week. Exoprise is an encrypted Web service that analyzes a customer's Microsoft messaging infrastructure, including the application usage patterns of individual end users and application dependencies, to determine whether it makes sense to move to Google Apps and Gmail or Microsoft's hosted email service.
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Exoprise also offers "wizard-driven migration tools" to help ease the move from an internal data center to a hosted service, and ongoing SLAs and performance monitoring.
"Most IT organizations don't have great insight into the usage of their existing systems," Lieblich writes in a blog post. "Whether it's a 100 person company or a 5,000 person company, they just don't know what's being used, what isn't, and how sophisticated their usage is of the applications and technology." Lieblich joined Citrix in 2006 when it acquired Reflectent Software, which he had also founded.
Exoprise is looking to help customers "secure your cloud adoption, automate it and manage it," and ensure proper management of hybrid environments in which some users remain in-house and others in a cloud service for reasons of security or performance, Lieblich writes.
Exoprise's reporting service starts at $100 for a 10-mailbox minimum, with the price scaling down to $2 per mailbox at higher volumes. There are two products: CloudReady for Google Apps, and CloudReady for Microsoft BPOS. BPOS is the current name of Microsoft's cloud-based tools including Exchange and SharePoint, but will become part of the new Office 365 service later this year.
"Despite promises of saving millions by moving users to the cloud with the click of a mouse, seasoned IT professionals know it's not quite that easy," Exoprise says on its website. "Enterprise applications like Microsoft Exchange are complex, mission-critical, dynamic environments. Moving to the cloud requires preparation, insight, and contingency planning. Most failed cloud migration projects lack one or more of these vital components."
Based in Waltham, Mass., Exoprise reportedly raised $1 million in venture funding from Fairhaven Capital Partners and angel investors.
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