Similarly, albeit with less drama, the technology roots of Scalix, a two-year-old messaging software company, is worth noting. Scalix has been winning a lot of attention among investors, the press, and prospective customers for its messaging software for Linux. What's the technology behind Scalix? It's Hewlett-Packard's discontinued OpenMail.

Scalix company founder, Julie Hanna Farris, has the benefits of both an entrepreneurial instinct and  career path that gave her front-row foresight for where and how messaging technologies play out in corporate settings. Part of that experience was as messaging  architect at BellSouth and marketing executive at IBM/Lotus. In 2002 she had already founded startups—onebox.com, 2Bridge, and Portola Systems—before setting sights on ways to create a viable messaging business on the foundation of OpenMail.

The time was right: The previous year, in March 2001, HP had a plug-pulling story of its own: Enterprise users were told that from November that year HP was to stop selling OpenMail to new customers. (They decided to stop development after the release of 7.0 but would continue support of versions 6 and 7 for five years.) This happened to be a well-received technology in the business world and generated more than a few grumbles.

Shades of phoenix rising: Farris hired key e-mail engineers from the original OpenView HP team, launched a new San Mateo company, Scalix, and licensed the OpenMail technology from HP.

 "OpenMail was mostly interesting to enterprise users who needed to interface Linux to MS Outlook and could afford to pay to support the continued development of OpenMail," wrote Bruce Perens. then senior strategist at HP at the time of its announced demise.

Today, Scalix Corp., with backing from Silicon Valley venture firms, can show yet another positive side to the phoenix syndrome. Its Scalix enterprise-class e-mail and collaboration suite might prove to be a dramatic boost in corporate confidence toward moving a company's e-mail and calendaring system over to Linux, enjoying without disruption the messaging features they're comfortable with without having to be weighed down by proprietary lock-in on the back end.

Cross-platform client support from Scalix allows companies to deploy integrated e-mail and calendaring and scheduling across Windows, Linux, UNIX and Macintosh desktops. The Scalix Web site carries the testimony of one user, the CIO of the city of Bloomington, Indiana, which just about sums up the Scalix appeal: "We were looking for a cost-effective Linux-based messaging system that offered rich support for Microsoft Outlook and would integrate with the infrastructure investments we have already made."

And where is this proof that Scalix is not only alive but well?  "This has been a pivotal year for us," says Farris. "This marks the first year of first customer deployments, all of which have gone well." She says Scalix paying customers are now "in the double digits," and that Scalix is able to show significant revenue growth. "This is the year where we can say we have moved out of the product-development stage when our customers were in pilot mode, to now where there are customer deployments."

Scalix today is pitched as "a messaging and calendaring" platform on Linux. Calendaring? We can see businesses losing sleep at night over integration, reliability, storage, security, and license affordability with e-mail, but who needs to worry about on-line calendars?

Farris knows better. "I often refer to calendaring and scheduling as a silent-killer app," she says," that has quietly become a key application in companies today, yet lack of integration with platforms and clients has made it difficult to exploit the application company-wide."

The fast-changing telecommuting and competitive  landscape are pointers to what has happened in the arrangement of business-communication priorities. Staying agile against smart competition,  brainstorming, setting agendas, mapping goals, partnering with other companies, have become challenges requiring more, not less, time-disciplined efforts toward virtual as well as inhouse group collaborations.

In a META Group study of business communications, one also senses those needs between the lines. First and foremost, the study results show that the telephone is no longer the preferred method of communication: E-mail rules, with 80% of respondents having chosen e-mail as the more valuable path. Their top three reasons point to the realities of seriously collaborative team work: They said e-mail most facilitates the ability to communicate with multiple parties; e-mail makes things happen faster; and e-mail provides a written record of interactions.