File this one in your irony folder. A Silicon Valley startup called Teneros closed a $40 million series D financing today, led by Advanced Equities. That brings the total raised since the company was founded to $84.5 million (other investors include Goldman Sachs, New Enterprise Associates, and Sevin Rosen Funds).
What does Teneros do? It keeps crashing Microsoft Exchange e-mail servers from taking down a company’s access to e-mail by providing remotely-managed “continuity appliances” that basically back up the servers. (Maybe it should consider changing its name to Tenemos, as in , “We’ve got your mail.”)
About two thirds of all companies use Microsoft Exchange for their e-mail, and even a few hours of downtime a year can cost businesses a lot of money. What I find ironic about this funding, and indeed this company, is that it is built entirely on the flaws of Microsoft Exchange. And its investors are willing to bet $84.5 million that Microsoft won’t be able to fix Exchange to obviate the need for Teneros’ product. No matter how much Microsoft itself invests in Exchange, there will always be times when it will crash. By the way, this is the same company that is going to save Yahoo.
(See also Azaleos, which raised $10 million last November).
Has anybody ever considered that Y! might fix MS?
In this case, Zimbra?
“By the way, this is the same company that is going to save Yahoo.”
K why don’t you go write a post about how much you love Apple fanboy. Please leave your opinions out of the news and just present us with the facts. We’re not children that need to you to hold our hand while explaining to us what these articles mean.
probably cheaper for MS to just buy Teneros, which might be in the bet.
@#2 TechCrunch Reader
Totally agree with you. These opinions that are appearing in blog posts and comments all over the web just show how childish half the internet community is. If Microsoft are such a badly-run company, just how is it that they make the revenue AND profits to pay $45B for Yahoo in the first place.
indeed, where would “tech support” be if not for the chronic crashing of microsoft’s stuff?
Wow, yeah Erick doesn’t hide his disdain here. Choosing to use the word ‘crashes’ vs. ‘downtime’, implying Microsoft is directly responsible for all downtime with your Exchange server, and finally throwing an irrelevant jab at the offer to buy Yahoo.
I know you’re going for the sexy title here, but come on this is ridiculous.
“By the way, this is the same company that is going to save Yahoo.”
Oh come on! Report the news, and trust that we are all bright enough to form our own opinions.
Exchange is actually damned stable. Sure, crashes do very occasionally happen. But there are times when it has to be offline for something other than a crash. This is a product for providing a remote backup appliance. Can you say internet service provider outage? Can you say power outage? Can you say natural disaster or fire in the data center? Can you say hardware failure? There is a wide range of reasons that an Exchange server could go offline. Your statement is a lot like saying “people have so little faith in the generators being run at their local power plant that they are willing to invest in a UPS for their servers”. One does not necessarily imply the other.
If Exchange was that flawed, two thirds of all companies (by your own statement) would not be using it. There are plenty of alternatives.
So if you are going to report something as news, then stick to the news. If you are going to throw in unprofessional asides, such as you did here, put a big banner at the top that says “Commentary” or “Editorial”. Or else find a job somewhere that will tolerate your juvenile and unprofessional behavior.
I couldn’t disagree more with #s 2 and 4 above. With all due respect to the TC staff, when did TC ever amount to more than a blog??? Sure… it gets inside dope and in that respect is a source for new information, but this is first and foremost a blog and therefore a forum to voice opinions, i.e. those of the bloggers. If you don’t like the opinions of the TC bloggers, don’t read the blog or simply disagree with them, but don’t fault them for voicing them. That is, after all, the raison d’etre of this whole enterprise (pardon me, Mr. Arrington, for presuming to know your motivations).
If you want straight facts, wait for the article to appear a few hours later on some newspaper’s website, where fact checking and vetting are performed by dedicated staff.
Arrrrghh… pet peev
Explain how it’s ironic.
“What I find ironic about this funding… is that it is built entirely on the flaws of Microsoft Exchange”
Let me give you an example of ironic: It’s ironic that you I’m telling you how to use the word ironic.
Maybe time to stop listening to Alanis Morissette Erick?
I wonder how Nick would have written this assignment… I miss Nick already…
Erick, i like you tend to write on the fringe, precariously close to the neighborhood of “i don’t care” (that’s not a bad thing necessarily) … Mike tends to tackle the Major news (along with Duncan, who is second to none, of course), the other staffers take the tip-line it seems… and Erick… clearly people are ticked at the little yahoo line at the end…
i for one, apparently, AM a child and CANNOT form my own opinions because I was hit with a surprise left on that last line and am actually hungry for some clarification. clarify how it’s relevant to this story please? how will this company save Yahoo? besides Exchange being mentioned, I struggle to make the tiniest connection between this story and the MS/Yahoo story… (which is run it’s course btw… if we don’t get a final word or competing offer TODAY then the whole thing was nothing but blog fodder and stock play anyhow.)
[irony]Maybe we should all switch to a product with better uptime for IT-hosted email servers, and run our system on a text-based IBM mainframe system. Then we could *really* be all Web 2.0.[/irony]
oh yeah… and if all the commenters are experts at understanding every nuance of the industry, then why aren’t I (and hundreds of thousands of other industry professionals) reading their blog all day every day? hmmmmm….
that doesn’t change the fact that Erick dropped an “ooops”.
@AN: that’s sarcasm not irony, but closer to the mark
Teneros does have a pretty compelling product. I remember looking at them a few years ago. Disaster recovery and business continuity is becoming more of a boardroom issue so it’s not surprising to see investment in this sector (though $84 million is really a lot of money)
I’m not being snooty here, but I wonder if them being a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner has anything to do with anything. Also, when Exchange goes down, is it always Microsoft’s fault? (again, I’m ignorant, not being snooty)
Raza Imam
http://BoycottS...eSweatshops.com
We actually use Teneros for our backup mail appliance and it works really well. Lets me patch exchange and do database cleanup without having to take our mail system completely down. Really nice product
wtf? 85 million to make a box that copies Exchange files around? i think they could’ve built a whole new version of Exchange for that. what’s interesting too is that once you buy the box it looks like they manage it remotely for you – so not only do you pay for the hardware, but you’re probably locked into a recurring subscription contract as well.
if email is that critical to your business, hire people that know wtf they’re doing instead of relying on a magic black box.
so…OSS is 100% flaw-proof? OSS is the end all and be all to everything? Are you kidding me?
I think think this shows that Microsoft’s strategy to embrace software-as-a-service, with the likes of Microsoft Forefront and other ISVs like Teneros, is working.
Didn’t Google need Postini to make their GMail product more enterprise friendly?
Just because MS Exchange crashes doesn’t mean it’s Microsofts fault, it could be a hard disk problem, RAM or whatever on the server.
Apple Fanboys! btw I have a macbook.
“if email is that critical to your business, hire people that know wtf they’re doing instead of relying on a magic black box.”
I think you’re confused about the investment capital for this company vs the price of the product.
The total pricing for this product is about the same as the enterprise *hardware* a ponytail would need to START to build his own continuity system, except it already *is* a *proven* continuity system, and they support it 24/7 and he doesn’t.
Oh and they are Exchange experts and he is or isnt. Oh and one less pile of perl scripts the new guy doesn’t want to support when that sysadmin leaves. Oh and that hardware you bought for him to develop that system is still sitting idle because it sounded like a fun project to him 2 months ago and he said it would be ‘easy for him’ but now he likes playing with his new Oracle box and there is a new version of Worlds of Warcraft. Oops and now hes been moved to another group…and…oops now hes discovered girls…
Welcome to turnkey enterprise solutions gilltots!
I think the bigger issue at hand is why something like Teneros is even necessary. Clustering was invented to solve this exact problem. If Exchange clustering actually worked as it should Teneros wouldn’t have a product.
Who wrote this? Is the author retarded? There can be million reason why Exchange crashed and none of them might be Exchange fault.
Let’s all switch to OSS/Linux. OSS is the end all and be all for everything. OSS is flawless, bullet-proof, hacker-proof, spam-proof…etc. OSS is God’s gift to humanity. Let’s tell MS to go fuck itself.
And in other news, restaurants cash in every time i’m too lazy to make dinner at home and plumbers cash in every time I don’t stop my daughter from flushing my keys down the toilet.
There are real reasons to take pokes at MS. This is not one of them.
Is there a market for this kind of thing with other major mail servers?
Do the other major mail servers crash for millions of reasons?
It’s important to note, as some have already in their comments, that Exchange sometimes goes down for reasons totally unrelated to Exchange itself: admin errors, power outages, third-party applications that blow up, etc. can all bring Exchange down, necessitating a product like Teneros’. To blame all Exchange downtime incidents on Microsoft just isn’t accurate.
@ 5. patrick
“indeed, where would “tech support” be if not for the chronic crashing of microsoft’s stuff?”
It’s like saying: Where would dentists be without rotten teeth?
@25: It is absolutely true that blaming MS for all Exchange outages is not accurate. It even may not be fair to blame Exchange for failing to recover gracefully and quickly from many outages that were not its fault — though I’ve heard enough horror stories about this to believe that oftentimes the shoe does fit.
But as pointed out by @21, these would be largely moot points if Microsoft were providing better clustering, replication and D/R capabilities in Exchange itself. The fact that investors have sunk $80m into filling this gap, with the implication that they expect rewards that multiply their investment many times, implies that these investors are betting a lot of money that Microsoft will not sufficiently improve Exchange to meet the continuity capabilities that customers need, despite the fact that some other vendors already do a good job of that in their competing enterprise mail server offerings.
I think this article goes to show how much even small businesses are embracing exchange based systems.
It’s much cheaper and easier for a small company without a large experienced IT team to rely on outside providers to provide “easy” DR services then to plan and implement something yourself.
The fact that this company has garnered a large investment pile shows the strength that Exchange has in the marketplace and the obvious trust that it is only going to get stronger.
What does the name Teneros mean?
In Latin, it is derived from Tenere and Teneo meaning to hold, to keep, to preserve, to maintain. In our customers’ businesses it translates to “Always-On, Available and Accessible Mission Critical Applications”.
oh and BTW, supporting a cluster is way more expensive you not only need an Exchange Person that knows WTF their doing but you’ll need at least 2 Servers each running Windows 2K3 Enterprise (caa-ching!) as well as a NAS or SAN (caa-ching!) Fiber Channel even… and to top it off, if you have a 2-3 node Active/Passive cluster for HA (High Availability), now you have 2-3 more machines to update and worry about as well! LOL, after that’s all said and done it’s a lot easier to just buy a Teneros box. Seems they also won am award from MSFT so they obviously know what they’re doing!
MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. — July 16, 2007 — Teneros has won the Partner of the Year Award for OEM Hardware, Device Manufacturing at the 2007 Microsoft Worldwide Partner Program Awards. The company was chosen out of an international field of top Microsoft Partners for delivering market-leading customer solutions built on Microsoft technology. The awards were distributed at a ceremony on July 11 in Denver, Colo. at the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference.
To all the people with positive comments; thank you for the praise. As a member of the Teneros team myself it means a lot to know that the concept of our business and our products themselves are well received by many people. We’re very excited about this new round of funding of course, it will give us the room to develop that we need. We continue to have 50% quarterly growth and this may be what we need to have a successful public launch and become the leaders in application continuity!
It’s a bit crass to hate on Microsoft these days.
It was fun 5 years ago, now it just feels like punching a baby.
OH and yeah of course billy gates is still a genius with a license to print moneyp (XP + Office).
I don’t get it. Even if MS Exchange was completely flawless and never went down, wouldn’t you still need HA & DR? Does Teneros protect only against the MS software – or also against problems with the hardware it runs on? Or the network connecting your hardware to the world?
When I think of Exchange DR, I’m more worried about hardware and networks than I am about Exchange itself. As pointed out…2/3 of all businesses run Exchange.