IP: Ruminations on Electronic Messaging Assoc. show

[Dave Farber <farber () central cis upenn edu>]

Date: Wed, 1 May 1996 13:16:57 -0700
From: Dave Crocker <dcrocker () brandenburg com>


        Folks seem to be treating this week as a watershed, in comparing it
to last year's EMA meeting.  Things went from "Internet mail is nice but
X.400 is the future for business", to "Now that Internet mail has won, how
long with X.400 hang around?".  On the other hand, I hear that some X.400
sales are continuing to grow.  As my wife likes to remind me, it takes
awhile to turn a big ship...


        Lotus is touting their Notes product with a t-shirt slogan that
Notes is a messaging system you won't have to "exchange"...


        Phil Zimmerman announced the creation of PGP, Inc.  Domain name
PGP.Com, but no web page yet.  Phil is chairman.  Tom Stedding, formerly of
Novell, is CEO.  Jonathan Seybold <jseybold () pgp com> is on the board and,
apparently the active agent for oem-type deals.  Dan Lynch is also on the
board.  Phil said that there were two major deals just signed or about to
be signed (he wasn't sure of the exact status), one with a major email
company and the other with a major computer company.  They don't have a
marketing person yet.


        Phil's presentation was quite funny.  The audience laughed a lot.
What I am not sure about is the actual impression he made.  Phil explained
that PGP had been a volunteer effort and that he didn't have slides for the
presentation because he didn't have a secretary.  He also said that people
often told him that they could not choose PGP for their business
requirements because PGP wasn't backed by a company.  So, he decided to
form one.


        The S/MIME and MSP presentations in the session gave basic
background of their functionality.  (Newsflash:  Steve Dusse showed S/MIME
as (now) supporting MIME Multipart/Signed.  This is quite recent and I
doubt anyone's products will support it for awhile.)  Phil's talk had no
technical or functional content.  He cited it as having an installed base
but gave no numbers.  His talk focused on his lack of administrative
support, on the lack of PGP, Inc. having a web page, on having to find
offices first, and so on.  He dropped his microphone a couple of times...


        As I say, the audience laughed quite a bit.  Vigorously.  But I
wonder whether they walked away believing that PGP, Inc. is going to
provide the responsible, stable, corporate basis for PGP?  Separately, I
wonder whether PGP will be offered in its entirety to the Internet
standards process (neither s/mime nor msp have been, only their MIME
enveloping) and I wonder whether there doesn't need to be another
commercial source of the core technology.


        Anyhow, email security is turning into an interesting horse race.
I didn't count MSP, the security technology from the US Defense Messaging
System, as a serious contender until this week.  At least two companies are
already offering it, even with smartcard (fortezza) support.  And MSP is
the only contender that currently claims to support non-repudiation of
recipients.


        Quite a few booths had signs showing S/MIME support.  I believe
none are shipping product yet.  (This isn't a problem, since
interoperability testing for s/mime only just got under way.)  On the other
hand, I heard a report of the RSA press conference which was supposed to
tout S/MIME support.  Apparently a number of the companies tapped to state
support instead stated merely that s/mime was "one of" the alternatives
available to users.  It will be interesting to see whether the press
realized how badly this (apparently) went.


        On a different note, it was interesting to see various
presentations talk about the importance of interoperability and -- now get
this -- the adequacy of gateways.  These are folks using proprietary
applications which are then gatewayed the Internet and other proprietary
applications.  For an Internet purist, this gives one considerable pause.


d/


--------------------
Dave Crocker                                            +1 408 246 8253
Brandenburg Consulting                             fax: +1 408 249 6205
675 Spruce Dr.                                 dcrocker () brandenburg com
Sunnyvale CA 94086 USA                       http://www.brandenburg.com


Internet Mail Consortium               http://www.imc.org, info () imc org