After scoring Transnet as a client, and collecting a Technology Top 100 award along the way, Mimecast must be onto something with its platform for the presentation, preservation and protection of corporate e-mail E-MAIL is the new paper. It is used for about 80% of written business communications today. Coupled with the growing spam, security and legal issues faced by this tool, it`s almost a given that most e-mail systems give their owners an electronic headache.

"E-mail has over time become a mission-critical application, but people haven`t always treated it that way," says Garth Wittles, MD of Mimecast SA.

"Most companies don`t have a well-thought-out or comprehensive strategy to manage, control or get the most value from business e-mail."

Like financial transactions, e-mail transactions represent value, opportunity and risk for a company. To capitalise on their value and to manage the risks, e-mail should be managed like financial transactions are managed. However, traditional e-mail systems are not designed to do this, observes Wittles.

E-mail systems weren`t designed to store large amounts of mail, for example, nor are they tailored to present a corporate image in communications. E-mail systems also offer a very blinkered view of information that passes through an organisation, and are neither reliable nor secure. - About three years ago, Mimecast`s founders came together to tackle these very issues.

Mimecast produces what it calls a next-generation e-mail architecture focused on managing the rapidly increasing information flow. It also takes care of the growing spam problem, and manages the risk of opening up an organisation`s networks to the world. And it complies with the provisions of SA`s Electronic Communications and Transactions (ECT) Act, which recognises electronic documents as legal, stresses Wittles.

Named one the most promising emerging enterprises in the recent Technology Top 100 Awards, Mimecast`s South African team is scattered between the UK and Johannesburg.

In mid-2005 the four-man local team achieved no mean feat when it signed on transport parastatal Transnet, with its 15 000 users across a dozen or so companies, as a client. Mimecast supplies and manages its e-mail management and security offering to the transport group via BEE partner SoftFinity, which in turn is outsourced by arivia.kom to Transnet.

Other notable clients include removal firm Elliots, Markinor, the University of Pretoria, ISPAfrika, Scientific Group, Apollo Scientific, Placerdome Western Areas, Buys Inc. Attorneys, and a number of advertising agencies.

"Most of our investment is in systems that deliver an automated service, which we can manage remotely and proactively. We want to capitalise on the vast numbers of small-to-medium-sized businesses, but also have clients that fall out of this range," notes Wittles.

Development and testing of its platform and solutions is done both in SA and the UK, while coding is handled by the UK office. "The UK is ahead of SA in terms of the ECT law, while initiatives around spam management originate from the UK and US regions. We also leverage quite heavily from the open source community, but we give a lot back to it," he remarks.

"What`s different about Mimecast is that we do it all. Yes, we have competitors who focus on the e-mail marketing aspect, the protection services, or the message warehousing, but we don`t have a competitor that does it all."

As a measure of his confidence in the product, Mimecast offers prospective clients the platform for a free month-long trial. It also offers the product as a managed service, with users paying a monthly fee as opposed to a steep licence and maintenance fee.

"There`s no magic formula to our future," he continues. "Our product is mature, and we now need to ramp up our staff complement while embarking on a channel development programme, finding some competent resellers first in South Africa, and then neighbouring countries, to punt our product."

Meanwhile, the Mimecast platform will continue to evolve with new functionality, enhanced performance and scalability, he says. A few weeks from now it will launch the next version of its platform, Mimecast 3.3, for example.

"We envisage incorporating instant messaging and VOIP into some converged platform, at a date driven by our customers," says Wittles.