My name is Charles Taite. I'm the CTO and co-founder of GWAVA. This has been covered in the past, but allow me to restate things for everyone. If you have any questions or comments, please feel free to contact me at ct@gwava.com

- Why did we acquire Submersion Corp. (Owners of the GEE Whiz source code) in the first place?

Over the last 5 years, GWAVA (the company) has been growing at an incredible rate. Currently over 50% of all GroupWise servers are protected by our software, and this figure increases every quarter. In order to keep up with our growth, we have gone from a handful of employees to around 100 today. Adding more administrative staff, customer service reps, support engineers, etc... has been relatively easy. GWAVA is a great place to work at (we have almost zero turnover). Our biggest growth problem has been in R&D because we develop primarily to NetWare and Linux.

Finding good NLM coders is rare. Finding good NLM coders with experience in email security is even rarer. Finding good NLM coders with experience in email security AND with excellent knowledge of GroupWise and its server-side APIs is nearly impossible.

First and foremost, we acquired Submersion for its developers. Outside of our company and Novell, there are only a handful of developers with the above-mentioned skills, and 4 of them were working for Submersion. And let's face it, those 4 developers spent most of their time duplicating technology already in GWAVA. From our point of view, Jeff and Darryl (the two principals at Submersion) were far too talented for that kind of work. We approached them about the idea of shifting towards working on more cutting edge stuff, and everyone agreed that an acquisition would be good for our companies and good for our customers.

The objective was never to let Gee Whiz "slowly die", but rather to combine our collective talents to deliver more and deliver it faster.

- What does this mean for existing GWAVA and GEE Whiz users?

Not only are we pooling our developer talent, we are also pooling our technologies. With a unified development team, it doesn't make sense to have two products (GWAVA and GEE Whiz). The objective is to build a "super-product". You can call it GEE Whiz 3.0 or GWAVA 4.0 or whatever you like. The name is not important. The product will give GEE Whiz customers access to GWAVA features they never had and it will give GWAVA users access to GEE Whiz features they never had.

GEE Whiz has the following that GWAVA doesn't have:

GWIA Scanner

SMTP Proxy

NetMail Scanner

Signatures

SpamAssassin

Textual Classifier

(To name a few)

GWAVA has the following that GEE Whiz doesn't have:

MTA Scanner

POA Scanner

SmarBlocker

Surveillance Mode

SQL Database

Multi-server management/deployment tools

support for multiple AV engines

(To name a few)

Essentially, the upgrade path for both GEE Whiz 2.x and GWAVA 3.x customers is the same. Both sets of customers should gain new functionality without losing any significant features, and will have the option of running the software on Linux, NetWare or Windows.

So GEE Whiz, the technology, has a good solid future, and GEE Whiz customers can look forward to lots of new features and functionality.

- What are your options if you purchased GEE Whiz upgrade protection AFTER March 1st, 2005?

If you purchased GEE Whiz upgrade protection AFTER March 1st, you are covered. There is nothing for you to do as you are entitled to the "super-product" in the future and GEE Whiz 2.x support in the mean time.

- What are your options if you purchased GEE Whiz upgrade protection BEFORE March 1st, 2005 and/or have opted not to renew your upgrade protection contract?

Most GEE Whiz customers' upgrade protection contracts were up for renewal this past June. If you chose not to renew at that time, or if your are coming up for renewal over the next 5 months, you are not currently entitled to the "super-product". Contact Omni for renewal pricing that will place on the upgrade path.

Even if you let your contracts expire, you can still contact Omni and sort it out. Omni will have several options for you that will allow you to get on the upgrade path.

- What if you like GEE Whiz 1 or 2, and want to stay put?

You can do that. We have officially end-of-lifed GEE whiz 1.x, which means there is no official tech support or patches planned, nor are we testing 1.x for compatibility with new versions/patches for Netware and GroupWise.

GEE Whiz 2.x is currently fully supported 24/7, and there are patches and maintenance planned through 2006 at least, so maintaining your GEE Whiz 2.x contracts will entitle you to 2.x support even if you choose not to upgrade to the "super-product".

- What if you would like to switch from GEE Whiz to GWAVA in the interim?

Again, contact Omni. They have discounts available for you to do that.

- This whole process has been confusing

First of all, I'm sorry for the confusion. That's something we were hoping to avoid. We established a relationship with Omni (who was competitor at the time of the acquisition) in order to insure a less confusing and smoother transition. We issued joint press releases and announcements, and then we left it to Omni to contact our North American GEE Whiz customers to explain the situation. We assumed that it would be better to receive the news from a familiar voice, rather then having a GWAVA employee "inform" you of the acquisition. Omni and GWAVA continue to work together to deliver better solutions for GroupWise. If you haven't checked out Omni's new mobility products, I strongly recommend that you do. They are really hot.

I hope that you'll give us chance to prove this to you and allow us to deliver on our promises, and I hope that clears it up for you. Again, if you have any questions, please feel free to contact me at ct@gwava.com

Charles Taite

Will we get email notification?  Things are getting better. I am really looking forward to the next real big improvement!!

I would really like to see more auto notification of updates for builds/revisions!!

Will