Co-founded International Messaging Associates (IMA), a multi-national networking software company specializing in corporate electronic messaging solutions. Served as Managing Director responsible for market research, product development (engineering, technical support and test engineering), technical writing and daily operations (Philippines). Acted as chief architect for the Internet Exchange Messaging Server, a corporate server email platform. Guided the company through a successful private funding placement in 1999.
The company was started in 1993 in the San Francisco Bay Area. We moved the company to Hong Kong in May 1994 and Philippine operations established in December 1997. The company was started with personal funds and growth sustained through product sales for the first several years. Grew revenue to USD 3M per year and staffing to between 70 and 80 staff across the two offices during this time. Staff turnover was almost non-existent. In 1999 we obtained our first external funding which was used to expand internal operations (both locations).
Prior to starting IMA I had spent several years working for Silicon Valley UNIX and Networking startup companies. I had briefly started a company, which while it was not successful was a valuable learning experience for what was to come later. I also spent several years doing applied research and development in the areas of electronic mail and related technologies for the US government. This included standards related work with the OSI Implementors Workgroup (NIST), IFIP 6.5 (X.400/X.500), and periphery involvement with the IETF MIME standards work. These combined experiences provided a unique perspective to markets and technologies as they relate to electronic messaging – which was critical in the establishment of IMA.
International Messaging Associates Website (Archive)
Commitment to Quality
IMA’s customers ranged from large corporate and government organizations to small businesses and included the US Senate, IRS, White House, US Navy, United Nations, The Red Cross, Financial Times, Morgan Stanley, Lehman Brothers, Minolta, Sony, and many others. As a provider of mission critical messaging solutions, stability, ease of use, and being responsive to the needs of our customers was essential. While we did have some growing pains in this area, the quality and stability of our solutions set us apart from the competition. This commitment to quality and the lowest possible defect rate was evident in not only our procedures but in how we structured the company.
Gateway Products
When IMA was established, the commercial use of the Internet was in its infancy. The web was just getting off the ground. Internet based email was largely limited to educational and government users with ties to the ARPANET/MILNET. Companies who used electronic mail did so mainly within their own groups using PC network applications such as cc:Mail (the market leader) and later Lotus Notes. The Internet Exchange gateway solutions provided a standards based connection between these legacy email islands and the global Internet. The gateway products ran under Microsoft Windows. Initially this was Windows 3.1 but over the years support for more modern platforms was provided as the newer operating systems became available.
Internet Exchange acts as a bridge between either a cc:Mail Post Office or a Lotus Notes Server and the Internet (or any TCP/IP network). Messages are exchanged between cc:Mail and Notes environments by converting messages and user addresses into formats understood on the Internet. In the other direction, messages and addresses were converted into messages and addresses understood in either the cc:Mail or Notes environments. This conversion process was transparent to end users on both sides of the gateway. Because of the translation effected at the gateway, cc:Mail and Notes users appeared as Internet users on the Internet side of the gateway, and Internet users appear as either cc:Mail or Notes users in the cc:Mail or Notes environments. This provided a non-intrusive way to integrate Internet messaging into existing LAN email environments.
Messaging Server
The Internet Exchange Messaging Server (IEMS) is a highly modular and scalable open architecture messaging solution. It was used in small single machine installations to fully distributed systems linking geographically distributed sites. IEMS integrated several different modules including the Message Transfer Agent (MTA), Distribution List Manager, Message Store, Directory Server, and others. IEMS modules are controlled (starting, stopping, monitoring) by the main server process, the responder. Messages are received by IEMS Input Channels, and sent through IEMS Output Channels. Foreign system connectors for cc:Mail and Lotus Notes ensured seamless legacy system integration.
IEMS 7 introduced a new integrated Anti-Spam approach to message reception and delivery. The MTA Pass-Through technology allowed end users (message store accounts), individual distribution list maintainers, and connector modules to define their own security profiles independent of the rest of the system. At the same time the messaging system administrator could still define an overall global security policy, where some anti-spam measures were handled directly by the MTA (such as reliable DNS-BL identified traffic). Other measures which may be desired by part of the user community, such as DNS-BL’s with known high false positive rates could then be passed through to the users for consultation on a case by case basis.
The Internet Exchange Messaging Server ran under Microsoft Windows and many Linux distributions. Legacy connectors for cc:Mail and Lotus Notes required a Windows machine but worked fine in a distributed IEMS network with other modules such as the MTA running Linux. Server maintenance was performed using the built-in IEMS web interfaces.
Company Operations
IMA had its main office in Hong Kong where lead engineering, primary finance, shipping, printing and some sales activities were handled. The Philippine office had an engineering group that worked together with their HK counterparts. In addition, technical support (including call center operations), test engineering, marketing, writing (technical, marketing and sales) were handled out of this office. An international sales representative network was established in the United States, United Kingdom and Germany with other regions handled directly through one of the IMA offices. I managed all Philippine operations in addition to directing the engineering efforts across both offices.
Engineering
All Gateway product design work was done out of the Hong Kong office. With the expansion to build the IEMS product line, overall system architecture and protocol work remained in Hong Kong, although the Philippine group had a large say in how the architecture evolved as well. Most UI and system related modules were designed and built in the Philippines. Engineering groups in both locations worked very closely with the technical support, test engineering, and technical writing groups.
Test Engineering and Technical Support
By their very nature, IMA products were highly technical. Our customers and main points of contact were experienced network administrators. We were building cutting edge messaging solutions with features and options not found in other products. This created both opportunities and challenges. The opportunities were obvious – we had a competitive advantage in our markets due to the combination of cutting edge features and highly reliable products. The challenges came with how to build a technical support group that knew the products well enough to communicate with and help senior level network administrators (our customers). How could we take problems that were encountered in the field, test them, and then turn around either fixes in the case of bugs, or workaround solutions in cases involving configuration issues? And how can we better test on an on-going basis so that we could find potential issues before our customers?
The solution was to integrate test engineering with technical support. This made it a requirement that all support people were “hands on” engineers. Time was split between support tasks (email, answering calls) and working in our test lab. The result was that out support people became much better, and had the ability to take problems from customers directly to a test environment for further analysis. It also ensured that we maintained a constant test mentality and capability. As we were providing 24×7 support, this extended our test abilities to also be able to run around the clock. Both technical support and test engineering benefited greatly from this integration.
Technical Writing and Documentation
When we opened the Philippine office one of the hopes was that we could build a strong technical writing team. For all the benefits of being in Hong Kong, finding professional English language technical writers was not one of them. What we found with the writers we hired was similar to what we found with the technical support group. The highly technical nature of our products made it difficult to find people who could both understand the technology and write professionally. This put me back in the position where I had to do most of the writing for the company. While it was hard to get people to write good original content, we did have success in writing other material. White papers, and other marketing and promotional material was handled well. The combination of the writing staff, support and engineering groups provided invaluable assistance with copy editing and proofing of the many drafts.
Copies of all IMA product documents can still be found on the archive site below.
IMA Product Documentation (archive)
Call Center
An integral part of our enterprise messaging solutions was the technical support that came with it. We ran a very successful 24×7 support group out of the Philippine office. Customers loved working with the newly integrated test engineering group. This allowed us to provide both quicker and better quality responses. The call center predated fast local Internet access and VoIP solutions were still a ways off. Instead we ran a Frame Relay circuit between our Philippine office and a Sunnyvale, California service provider who also provided 4 phone lines to directly connect into our FRAD. On the local side we ran a Dialogic based PABX to connect the office extensions with both local phone and USA phone connections. When we changed offices we leased out a full floor in a local office building, and proceeded to rip out all power and telco cabling. This was replaced with proper 3-wire circuits connecting to a full floor Online UPS. This in turn was connected to both the local electric provider and an emergency generator. In an environment famous for power problems we ended up with a setup that provided 100% up-time regardless of local power issues or weather.