The many customers have shown interest in our internal collaborative mail application, MRX. Essentially, this maintains a web-accessible database of all a company's mail. However, it excludes personal mail and spam, and is able to thread mail according to customer or project. It provides a real-time searchable archive of company mail while allowing users to stick their favourite mail client.

One of the designated MRX pilot customers, Marc Williams of city architects Harper Downie said:

"MRX is exactly what we have been looking for. No matter what database systems we put in place, we can never force our customers and suppliers to use them. The only common ground is email, and like many other companies, we have ended up using our email server as a file server - something it was never meant to be. We hope MRX will effectively allow us to continue to use email as our central data repository, but with amazing speed of recall, and very little overhead."

We recently decided to commercialise MRX as a Software as a Service (SaaS) and to assist in this development, approached the South East England Development Agency (SEEDA) for a commercialisation loan. We are pleased to say that we were successful in our application, and are now well into the project.

Mike Denison, JPY's finance director, said

"Of course the external finance is great to get, but more important is the fact that MRX proposition has been scrutinised by a panel of obdurate industry-savvy experts and been able to convince them of it unique offering."