Linux.com

Lycoris acquires Mitel SME Server spin-off

"This development is interesting because the e-smith/SME package was well thought of in its time,” commented Stephen O’Grady, Senior Analyst at RedMonk. O’Grady, who focuses on enterprise application deployment, believes that the Contribs.org acquisition will make Lycoris appealing to a smaller enterprises. “SME Server would give Lycoris a workable desktop/server combination to market to small-to-medium enterprises,” he said.

Designed for small to medium sized enterprises, SME Server converts a standard PC into an easy-to-use, powerful server that can handle all of a company’s email and web-hosting needs. The product also includes a secure firewall, a file- and print-server, an FTP server, a proxy server, and more. SME Server uses a web-based administration interface to make it easy for administrators to configure the server without advanced technical knowledge. The former Mitel Networks product also integrated a number of managed services, including Virtual Private Networking (VPN) technology, antivirus scanning and system monitoring, although Lycoris has yet to decide whether it will be making similar services available.

Lycoris intends to make a new commercially supported platform based on SME Server available during October, allowing the Redmond, WA-based vendor to provide customers with flexible network server solutions to complement its existing desktop offerings.

Despite the product’s promise, Lycoris’ small number of employees and limited financial and development resources may cause SMEs to steer clear of the company’s solutions for now, O’Grady told NewsForge. “The difficulty with approaching SMEs is that the SME play by definition is a volume play, with requisite volume support issues,” he said.

The SME Server platform has a chequered commercial history, and Lycoris is the third company to assume control of the project. Originally developed by Joe Morrison as a server distribution based on Red Hat Linux, e-smith Server and Gateway was commercialised in 1999 when Morrison co-founded e-smith, Inc. Mitel Networks, an IP telephony company based in Ontario, Canada, acquired e-smith in 2001, and product was rebranded “Mitel SME Server”. However, Mitel subsequently discontinued community-based development of the product in November 2003, despite a mature and active community of volunteers inherited from e-smith. A volunteer team coordinated by Resource Strategies released an initial free version based on Mitel code at the beginning of 2004, but has subsequently achieved little.

Rus Bayne, Lycoris vice president of sales, says, "We're very excited to be involved with this project. Lycoris is committed to our userbase, and this will extend our software line into the server arena.”

------

Additional reporting on this story by Robin 'Roblimo' Miller.

A draft of the press release now showing at contribs.org was originally appended to this article, but was removed once the "official" version was posted -- and turned out to be substantively identical to the one we ran.