South Africans make good in London

Peter Bauer is CE of Mimecast, founded in 2002 to exploit some new thinking on what many would consider a mundane subject. But as is often the case, behind the seemingly simple hides the complex.

Mimecast opened a Johannesburg office in 2004, not long after its initial e-mail platform became available globally, and the approach found instant favour, says SA MD Garth Whittles. The Mimecast approach, which moves archiving, long-term storage, security, continuity and disaster recovery into "the cloud", works best in an environment of cheap and ubiquitous broadband, which SA did not have at the time, and arguably still does not.

"Despite the challenges of cost and availability of bandwidth, which could be a major stumbling block to a service like this, customers adopted the service; across the board as well t just small companies but even some large enterprises," says Whittles.

"Even with the high price of broadband customers were seeing the value of simplifying their mail environment and reducing cost, and despite the telecoms outlay were achieving savings," Whittles adds.

Bauer says it has become very fashionable in the US and UK for IT managers to have a flagship money-saving project. "So we benefit quite nicely from that because one of the primary benefits is infrastructure consolidation and changing the way companies pay for their mailing solution. Because it is subscription-based, there isn`t a big outlay which is a lot more popular now."

THE PATH FOLLOWED

"I`ve worked in the e-mail space some time," says Bauer, who started with an MCSE. "I did the e-mail track...I witnessed the emergence of e-mail as a corporate tool, connected to the internet and not just an intranet set up."

After some years of working in SA, Bauer left for London, where he met fellow South African and IT businessman Neil Murray.

The two quickly found themselves throwing ideas about. "We came up with two big ideas," says Bauer. The first was that managing e-mail systems had become a complex process built around an `ad hocery` of disparate applications. "We saw there was commonality in technology across these different applications, and asked ourselves `why don`t we write a piece of software that can do all of them?`."

"But it was the second idea that probably made Mimecast as successful as it is - and that was to build it as a big-multi-tenant online infrastructure so that our customer did not have to buy any hardware or software to be able to benefit from the system."

Bauer and Murray appointed a team of programmers to write the code in January 2003. By coincidence they were all South Africans.

"After 18 months we had something that sort of worked and we had about 30 initial beta-test customers. They really liked the concept behind it, bought into it and we started to generate some revenues.

"We`ve also seen a real increase in popularity in the software-as-a-service space.

"It`s become commonplace for companies to consider outsourcing a piece of their mail management environment. That gave us a market that was ripe and ready to adopt our product and we`ve taken on about 1 200 customers in the last two years."

Bauer says about 450 million companies globally that have in-house mail services, 210 million of them using MS Exchange. "It`s a multibillion-dollar market opportunity. So we`ve become quite expansionist in our thinking."

The company now has offices in London, Johannesburg, Cape Town, Boston and even Manchester. There is a dedicated reseller in Ireland and small operations in Sweden, Jersey and the Caymans to service the Caribbean offshore jurisdiction.