Friday, February 23, 2007

Re: Open Letter To GWAVA Customers

Friends,

I wanted to communicate with you to discuss the delayed release of GWAVA 4 for NetWare. We at GWAVA are sincerely sorry that it is taking longer then expected and I wanted to explain the decisions and reasoning that has lead to this delay.

I was recently on an air flight that was delayed for many hours and as a passenger, I appreciated the pilot’s frequent and detailed progress reports. It helped make a difficult situation better. In that spirit, I would like to give you some background information on the release of the GWAVA 4 and the latest on its planned release.

With over 15 Million mailboxes around the world protected by GWAVA 2.x and 3.x, GWAVA 4 is the largest and most important release in our company’s history. GWAVA 4 is also a complete re-write of GWAVA 3, and adds a more scalable infrastructure that better suits larger enterprises then GWAVA 3. I compare the GWAVA 3-to-GWAVA 4 upgrade to the upgrade from NetWare 3 to NetWare 4. Just like NetWare 4, GWAVA 4 includes a directory and a replication engine that makes managing and deploying multiple GWAVA servers much simpler to do. Also, like the move from SYSCON to NWAdmin, the management of GWAVA 4 also moves from single server management tools to a web-based, auto-replicating multi-server management environment. We are also delivering some revolutionary anti-spamⁱ technology as part of the most comprehensive security solution any e-mail platform has ever known. It is quite frankly the most ambitious project in our history... And we want it to be perfect.

RELEASE STRATEGY

When planning the release of GWAVA 4, it was decided early on, that although GWAVA 4 was designed simultaneously for NetWare, Linux^{Wikipedia.">Wikipedia." class="glossary-indicator">i} and Windows; the release of supported platforms would be staggered. Our plan was to first release GWAVA 4 on Linux, then a few months later on Netware, and several months later on Windows. GWAVA 4 for Linux was released in November of 2006, which means that GWAVA 4 for NetWare is next to be released.

Why did we choose this release strategy? Because we felt that in spite of our best Quality Assurance (QA) testing efforts, the release of GWAVA 4 would certainly uncover bugs we had not discovered during our QA process. By releasing GWAVA 4 on Linux first, we knew that it would be installed by far
fewer people, since only a small percentage of GroupWise servers are deployed on Linux (most GroupWise servers are deployed on NetWare). This meant that we could release GWAVA 4 on Linux, with the confidence that we would have more then enough technical support resources to assist our customers and quickly fix bugs should they be discovered. We felt that QA would find 90% of the bugs, and the Linux release would uncover 7% to 9% of bugs, which means that when GWAVA 4 NetWare was finally released to 15 Million users, it would be as bug-free as humanly possible.

EXTERNAL CIRCUMSTANCES FORCE CHANGES

Unfortunately, spammersⁱ had different plans. In late 2006, the world was flooded with spam. By most accounts, Internet spam traffic increased by as much as 1000% in a few short weeks. Suddenly Botnets were the focus of anti-spam and media attention. So just as we were releasing GWAVA 4 for Linux (which had the technology necessary to address this new spam scourge), our customers running GWAVA 3 on NetWare were asking for help with the flood of spam.

We made the most responsible decision we could at the time. Rather then rushing the NetWare release of GWAVA 4, and forcing our customers to rush through a major upgrade right before the Christmas/New Year holidays, we decided to integrate enough of GWAVA 4’s anti-spam technology into GWAVA 3 to help address the problem. GWAVA 3.7 was released based on the mature and stable GWAVA 3 platform but included some of GWAVA 4’s new anti-spam system.

We felt a minor upgrade from 3.6 to 3.7 would make more sense to address this short-term problem, and would act as a bridge to the upcoming release of version 4. And from most reports, 3.7 has been successful in its mission.

The one negative consequence of this decision is that for approximately 4 weeks, our development team was focused on 3.7. This came at the expense of version 4. This forced us to postpone the release of GWAVA 4 for NetWare until BrainShare 2007 (end of March) and the Windows release until Q3.

We sincerely regret the delay, but hope that you will understand, that GWAVA wants to deliver to you the very best security solution for GroupWise, and we want to deliver without any major bugs. Our private Beta testers have provided us with excellent feedback and we hope to begin expanded Beta testing in early March with a view towards our BrainShare release.

I think of GWAVA 4 for Linux as 4.0, and GWAVA 4 for NetWare as 4.1. By this strategy, we avoid the pitfalls of the typical “.0” release. Many GroupWise administrators have a policy of always waiting for the first service pack before upgrading. We planned to launch GWAVA 4 for NetWare simultaneously
with GWAVA 4’s first service pack. It took Novell one year to release Service Pack 1 for GroupWise 7. We are delivering GWAVA 4’s first service pack four months after its November release on Linux.

Everyone at GWAVA is fully committed to GWAVA 4 for NetWare’s BrainShare release. I hope to see many of you at Salt Lake City and look forward to your feedback. I can always be reached at ct@gwava.com and would welcome any questions or comments you may have.

Sincerely,
Charles Taite
CEO