TrueSwitch tool a key to MSN's fight with AOL

By Brian Sullivan

May 21, 2002 12:00 PM ET

Computerworld - The tool behind Microsoft Corp.'s $10 million campaign to grab customers from rival America Online Inc. comes from a 12-person company in downtown New York.
The Microsoft Network (MSN) Internet access service today announced TrueSwitch, a tool created by Esaya Inc. that provides the means for customers of Dulles, Va.-based AOL to switch their e-mail accounts and membership to MSN.
Making that migration easy is why Esaya created TrueSwitch in the first place, said Mark Kasiraja, the company's chief operating officer and co-founder, in a telephone interview this morning.
Kasiraja said he and his partner, Esaya CEO Thomas Isaac, built TrueSwitch to allow users of one Internet service provider (ISP) to easily change to another without much trouble. MSN is the company's first major customer, he said, although other companies have used it for smaller operations, such as moving employees from one e-mail system to another
"We're specifically targeting ISPs," Kasiraja said. "We drew it up and marketed to them."
But Kasiraja said the tool could be used for any operation in which information needs to be transferred from one Web-based system to another. And the company would be willing to tailor the tool to meet each client's specific needs, he added.
The tool, which operates on Java-based machines running Unix, is at its core a data integration, mapping and transformation engine. It logs on to AOL using the customer's current user ID and password and then collects all of the necessary information about the user's e-mail address book and account and migrates that information to MSN, Kasiraja said.
The process includes the following steps:

Transferring old e-mails and calendar information.

Notifying all of the user's contacts that the e-mail address has changed.

Forwarding e-mail from the AOL account to the new MSN account for as long as the old account remains active.

Canceling the old account.

Along with the tool, MSN has launched a $10 million promotional campaign to get users to switch their allegiance. AOL said it had no comment on the TrueSwitch tool or MSN's campaign.
Kasiraja said that if the MSN campaign is a success, Esaya should have no problems scaling TrueSwitch to meet a rise in demand. He said Esaya monitors load, and if demand goes up, the company simply adds more servers to the operation. That, he said, is all that is required to scale the tool.
"It is a pretty seamless exercise," Kasiraja said.
Another aspect of TrueSwitch is that it goes into an application through the front end, as opposed to the back end. Kasiraja saidthis allows business rules to remain intact during a change.
Kasiraja said that pricing is based on a flat licensing fee plus a per-user fee. He did not get into specifics, and MSN wouldn't comment on how much it spent on the tool. But Kasiraja said that the higher the licensing fee paid upfront, the lower the per-user fee would be.

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