Announcing an overwhelming response to an invitation to participate in the beta test of MailShadow, Cemaphore has declared that the number of applicants is approaching 2,000. Hoping to launch its beta program later this month, the company has not yet announced how many users it will actually enroll in the beta1 program.

 

MailShadowG is designed to immediately synchronize e-mail, calendars and contacts between Outlook, Exchange and Gmail. The company was originally looking to sign up around 500 qualified participants and it has already received far more applications that it originally needed. The company expected the small and medium companies to apply, and the majority of applicants were indeed from the small business segment. But what was surprising for the company was the number of large organizations that applied to participate in this test. The company says that a full 15 percent of these immediate applicants are from large organizations.

 

Currently, the first version of MailShadowG serves Gmail customers. But the company revealed plans to offer Web services-based MailShadow solutions in the future for other key e-mail service providers as well.

 

“The phenomenal response we are seeing to MailShadowG is underscoring the critical market needs we are working to fill,” said Tyrone Pike, Cemaphore President and CEO. “It is very clear that the ability to deliver the highest level of e-mail continuity from within the cloud will have a major impact on the way that SMBs, consumers and even large enterprises implement, manage and archive e-mail content in the future.”

 

Among other types of applicants, individual users accounted for 10 percent with the remainder coming from academic institutions and government. Also, only 60% of the immediate applicants are from the United States, and the rest are from other parts of the world.

 

Using Google (News - Alert) Apps cloud-based services, MailShadowG provides Web services-based e-mail continuity and disaster recovery solutions. Any e-mail user can get continuity, content management, and portability of their rich e-mail with the help of MailShadow. MailShadow’s transaction-based architecture synchronizes all content bi-directionally in real-time. It also provides an opportunity to view the protected content transparently from Outlook or via Google’s Web interfaces for Gmail, contacts and Google Calendar.