>>>I think we should all stand up for Scott in his fight against this new
>>>gorilla.
>
>Why? The pricing totally separates the products, no conflict or overlap at
>all.
First, I appreciate all of the people who are supporting our
software. And, I'll agree that some people may be overreacting a bit.
I think the primary issue is that Ipswitch made a conscious decision to
treat us as a competitor. A year ago, we were just one of a couple of
companies selling an addon product for IMail. That's a good thing for
IMail; it helps with their sales. In fact, a number of people contact us
asking if we have a version of Declude for [insert name of other mail
server here]. Some of those people end up buying a copy of IMail, because
it's often cheaper to buy IMail+Declude than to buy one of the competing
products. It's a win-win situation for Ipswitch and us.
At some point, Ipswitch realized that if we were successful selling a
$500/$800 anti-virus solution (when the competition charges about 10 times
that), they could make a lot of money selling an anti-virus solution for
IMail that was more expensive than ours, but less expensive than the
others. I'm not sure if this was before or after we sent them a copy of
Declude Virus for testing (at their request). They are well aware of
Declude Virus; there are a number of people there who have a good knowledge
of Declude. When they decided to sell an AV solution, rather than come to
us and ask if we wanted to work with them, or just let us know what they
were doing, they made a decision that it would be better not to talk to us,
and not to let us know what they were up to.
Fast forward to about 10 days ago, when I first got word of this. Not from
Ipswitch, but from someone who had heard from Ipswitch and assumed that we
already knew. I contacted someone at Ipswitch who I have worked with in
the past. When they confirmed that they were releasing an AV solution, I
expressed my concern that they were treating us as a competitor, and asked
for whatever information they could supply. I got a 2-sentence overview,
and the pricing; quite a bit less information than they had already given
out to sales partners of theirs, and quite a bit less information than was
recently posted on here. This coming less than 2 weeks before the release
of the product.
Now, it seems that Ipswitch has an employee hiding behind a Hotmail account
to address concerns about the new Ipswitch product (and comparing it with
Declude). That's just very unusual.
I don't see a problem with healthy competition, and I certainly feel that
our product is a very worthy contender, so I don't have a problem there. I
(as are many others) am just confused as to the way that Ipswitch is
treating us.
-Scott
---
Declude: Anti-virus, Anti-spam and Anti-hijacking solutions for
IMail. http://www.declude.com
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