Merce is a software product which runs on servers and provides most of the core services that a medium to large enterprise needs:

• file serving
• email
• Web access
• network and server monitoring

We therefore say that Merce takes care of the IS infrastructure needs of an enterprise or academic campus. A summary of features may paint a clearer picture about the features.

While email and Web access, etc. are old and well understood services, Merce adds value to these because:

• Merce provides an integrated management interface which allows dozens or hundreds of servers to be controlled using a single interface without making individual changes to each server's configuration. A single administrator can manage thousands of user accounts and services across dozens of servers. Read more...
• An emphasis on Logging, Audit and Control (LAC): Merce provides controls on most of the network services to allow auditability and corporate policy enforcement. Read more...
• Merce is a proven industrial-strength solution. Manually setting up and configuring an operating system with a set of layered software components will never deliver this degree of stability and security. Read more...

Our approach of providing a comprehensive set of all essential services under an integrated management layer has sometimes made some people describe Merce as "an ERP for IS infrastructure."

Merce is backed by the services and training offerings of the Merce Professional Services Group (Merce PSG) and support of Merce Partners in India and overseas. Merce has been deployed at various sites, some of which are documented here. More details about how Merce fits into various verticals can be found in a set of presentation walkthroughs available on this page.

Merce is an acronym for Messaging and Enterprise Resource Control Environment. We pronounce Merce as "mur-say", to rhyme exactly with the phrase per se.

Merce is currently certified and tested for various specific versions of RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux) and SLES (SuSE Linux Enterprise Server) Linux only. Previous versions had been ported to SCO Unix, AIX and Solaris. Since Merce has a completely browser-based UI, there is no need for the Merce administrator to "learn Linux".

Current versions of Merce have been certified only for Linux on Intel and AMD processors, both 32-bit and 64-bit. There are many other hardware platforms that Linux supports, but Merce has not yet been certified on any of those platforms.

Merce's Product Division undertakes to port the current version of Merce, and support it, on most of the modern industry-standard Unix platforms for an individual customer after receiving a firm order. We have an internal list of Unix and Linux platforms for which this offer is valid; please check your OS flavour with us before ordering. Our experience with heterogenous platforms allows us to make this porting commitment as a time-bound project. We will maintain the Merce port on your platform and integrate it with our release engineering processes to generate all bug-fixes and updates. We will provide support for all supported OS platforms for a minimum period of five years from the date of release of its port.

There is no Merce component which is installed on the desktop. Merce works seamlessly and stably with MS Windows desktops, MS Office, MS Outlook, and any other popular desktop application. Hence, for users who are used to MS Windows, zero retraining is needed.

Merce is not a network management system (NMS). IBM Tivoli and CA Unicenter are both well-known NMS products.

Merce is a solution which provides and manages some network services; in this respect, it is quite different from the comprehensive, general-purpose NMS solutions like IBM Tivoli, CA Unicenter, HP Openview, and others. Those products do not provide services; they help you manage existing servers and services.

Merce and the well-known NMS solutions have one point in common; they both enhance manageability of an enterprise network. Merce is an order of magnitude simpler and smaller than those products, however. Those products have a design which attempts to address all aspects of all components on the enterprise network. This makes them very large and complex. The design of Merce follows the 90-10 rule, where Merce implements and automates only the most commonly executed 10% of operations that a system administrator has to do.

On the other hand, Merce is more sophisticated than the general-purpose NMS solutions. This is because Merce takes a service-oriented view, not a component-oriented view of the network. Merce does not present to the administrator a set of components to be managed, e.g. servers, routers, etc. It presents the view of a set of services, e.g. the email service, the Usenet news service, etc. This way, the Merce administrator creates a new system user, and Merce internally reconfigures all relevant servers, daemons, and processes to allow the new user to use email, Web access, etc.

More details can be obtained from a Merce technical report discussing this subject. Please ask your Merce representative for a copy.

MS Exchange focuses on providing email, contacts database, and calendaring/ scheduling. Merce delivers on a much wider canvas. This comparison needs a detailed discussion, but the following table may give a quick overview:

Merce is quite a different product from MS Exchange. They have some common features, e.g. an email service, but they also differ in significant ways.

MS Exchange will only run on operating systems from Microsoft. This becomes a problem if your organisation prefers to avoid getting locked into one OS family. This also becomes a problem if your organisation has concerns about platform security, because of the security vulnerability track record of Microsoft operating systems. Merce runs on Unix and Linux, both of which have strong track records as secure enterprise-class platforms.

Secondly, Merce will run on all classes of computers, starting from an Intel i486 server running Linux, to high-end servers like the Sun Starfire E25000 servers with 144 processors, or the IBM eServer zSeries mainframes. Microsoft's operating systems run only on a limited range of hardware platforms.

Other features have sharp differences too. MS Exchange does not have anything resembling the online real-time network monitoring system of Merce Insight, for instance.

However, if your organisation believes in using Microsoft operating systems for providing network services like email, MS Exchange is probably the most popular email solution for you.

For a full comparison between MS Exchange and Merce, ask your Merce representative for a technical report on the subject.

Lotus Notes (also referred to as IBM Notes Domino) is a powerful product whose server-side components can run on a variety of operating systems, including Microsoft Windows, OS/2, Linux, and various Unix flavours. Its services can be accessed using non-proprietary mail and Web clients as well as the proprietary Notes client application. Advanced features like collaboration, workflow, etc. are only available through the Notes client.

Merce aims to provide all the essential network services in an integrated environment. Notes offers a data replication platform on which it offers email, calendaring/ scheduling, contacts database, and the possibility of building workflow and collaboration applications. The features can be compared as follows:

Like Merce, Lotus Notes has a powerful replication facility which allows for all administrative actions to be performed at one location. It then replicates those changes throughout the enterprise network. It has many other features which allow the building of workflow applications. If your requirements are email alone, then those features are not useful. Also, such applications require the use of the fairly heavy proprietary front-end Notes client. Moreover, collaborative features in Notes are available as a separately priced option which considerably increases the total investment amount.

We feel that if you want to build workflow applications, Lotus Notes takes your network services to a new level. However, for email and other standard network services, Merce is a very attractive proposition and covers more ground.

For a full comparison between Lotus Notes and Merce, ask your Merce representative for a technical report on the subject.

Unix comes with many user administration tools, and when I create a user, he automatically gets email access. Why then do I need Merce?

Merce allows you to create a user for an entire network of servers by creating it at one place. Therefore, even if we are to compare merely the user creation function, Merce gives you an integrated view of user management which normal Unix tools do not.

Secondly, a user created in Merce is associated with a location. This location is an abstraction created by Merce, which maps onto physical offices or sites. If a user moves between two locations in an organisation, then the Merce administrator merely changes the ``location'' attribute for that user, and all his emails get redirected to the new location, all his other services go through servers at that location, etc.

Doing this using standard Unix tools requires a carefully integrated set of home-grown scripts with networking code built-in. An experienced systems administrator can write such scripts, provided he worries about bugs, security vulnerabilities, reliability, etc., and has many months of free time to develop even a fairly basic suite of scripts. If he wants a tried and tested product, which is supported by a professional team, then Merce is the answer.

One interesting benefit of using something like Merce is that basic Unix operations like user creation now no longer need the creator to have the Unix root password. He just needs to have Merce administrator access. Giving root access to many administrators in a large enterprise is like giving away the keys to the kingdom; this has traditionally been a problem with Unix server administration.

Mind you, we only touched upon user creation and re-location. Merce is much more than this.

Why should I use Unix for email at all? I have MS Windows NT or 2000 or XP, and they provide all I need. Therefore, I don't need Merce.

You have MS Windows, which is an operating system. Do you have a mail server solution on top of it? Unlike Unix, Windows does not come bundled with any equivalent of Sendmail. Therefore you will still need an email solution on top of Windows if you want to provide email to your organisation.

Secondly, Merce is not an email solution alone. At the very basic level, the most obvious four services that Merce offers includes:

• file serving
• email
• controlled Web access
• network and server monitoring
• an integrated management interface with reports and logs

How will you get the equivalent of all this from just an operating system?

However, if you have other reasons to use MS Windows servers for email, then other factors may become secondary. And perhaps the most well-known email solution on MS Windows is Microsoft's own Exchange Server solution. In that case, Merce will not be an option for your organisation.

If Merce runs on Unix or Linux, aren't these operating systems very difficult to use? We have never used Unix or Linux.

Once Merce is set up, you do not need to know Unix or Linux to use it. One of the primary design goals of Merce was to allow the system administrator to avoid using the Unix or Linux shell prompt and type commands. Merce converts a bunch of Unix or Linux boxes into dedicated network servers, and hides their Unix-ness away for 99\% of their daily operations.

Merce has a pure Web-based interface. All routine operations that can be done in Merce can be done from this interface. Therefore, you can use a Web browser from any desktop, connect to the Merce master server, and manage an entire enterprise network.

Merce runs on Linux and Unix, but our organisation has non-technical people who only use Microsoft Windows 95 and 98 for their work. They cannot use Linux. Therefore, is Merce of any use to us?

Yes, it is. Merce only runs on servers. The desktops can use any operating system, including Microsoft Windows, MacIntoshes, Unix workstations, OS/2, or anything else. As long as your desktops have Web browsers and Internet-compatible email clients (i.e. ones which work with SMTP, POP3 and IMAP4 mail servers) your users can use Merce.

In today's world, thanks to the Internet, it is hard to find someone who does not know how to use a Web browser or an Internet- ready email client. Therefore, practically all computer users will be able to use Merce. In fact, they will not even be able to guess that their servers are running Linux or Unix.

Linux is free software. If Merce runs on Linux, should it not be free too?

No. Only the Linux kernel --- the core of Linux --- is free. There are many commercial software systems which run on Linux, which you have to purchase. One well-known example is the Oracle database management system, which is an expensive and complex software system, available on about ninety platforms including Linux.

Similarly, Merce too works on Linux but is a commercial product.

Everyone knows how to use MS Windows NT servers. No one knows how to use Linux and Merce. Why should our organisation opt for something for which we will have to invest so much in training?

No one really provided organised training for the world when the GUI Web browser was introduced to the world. People who were computer literate taught themselves how to point on hyperlinks and click. Even today, when users visit \comptxt{amazon.com}, they teach themselves how to use the Website.

Merce too has an intuitive Web interface. No training should be required to use the interface. The Web is certainly simpler and easier to learn to use than the GUI of a typical operating system.

Secondly, there is no enterprise-class multi-server messaging solution which can be administered, configured and managed with zero training. A good example is IBM Lotus Notes. Merely having a GUI does not make the underlying concepts of Notes any simpler. The logic of ``everyone knows MS Windows'' cannot be extrapolated to these sophisticated software systems. In fact, we suspect that problems with the performance of some MS Exchange installations sometimes arise purely because system administrators underestimate the technical knowledge needed to manage them, because they have been sold on the belief of ``everyone can manage MS Windows'' a bit too deeply.

Our organisation has no direct links connecting our various offices. Will we be able to connect them all using Merce?

Merce is not a hardware connection or networking technology, so you cannot replace physical cables and connections with Merce.

However, with Merce, you can have servers in your various offices communicate with each other, provided each of these offices can connect to the Internet, even using a dialup Internet link. Merce will then re-route all email and other control messages from one office to another \via Merce's message routing servers on the Internet. Messages from one office to another will first be pushed out to Merce's routing server, and then, when the recipient office dials up and connects to the Internet, it will pull out these messages to its mailboxes.

Alternately, Merce can be configured such that all your remote locations and branches can connect securely over the Internet to a central Merce master server at your HO. This will allow you to create an email network over the Internet, where all sites communicate with the HO. This will work even without any dedicated WAN links connecting your sites.

We have fifty or more small offices, each with less than ten users. If we set up a Merce-based solution for messaging, will we have to buy one or more Merce slave server licences for each of these offices? Won't that become prohibitively expensive?

The pricing structure for Merce has a per-user component and a per-server component. You need to add up these two components to arrive at the total amount of investment you need for \manus licence fees.

In your case, the per-user component of licence fees will be independent of the number and sizes of your offices. Your concern will be about the per-server licence fees. If you have a large number of small offices, and each office needs a server, then your total per-server licence fees will rise.

If an enterprise needs a large number of small slave servers, and the ratio of users to servers is small --- e.g. 10 users for each server --- then we can offer special pricing structures which will make the total investment more attractive to you. Please contact Merce Sales with details of your enterprise network architecture.

What kind of server hardware do I have to buy to install Merce?

This depends totally on the loads that your users will generate on the servers.

The Merce master server may not experience much CPU load; a modern single-processor server may be able to handle the master-side processing for an enterprise with even 10,000 users. The amount of RAM required on this server depends on whether the Merce relational database is hosted on the same server. If yes, then the RAM requirements of the database engine will need to be taken into account. If the RDBMS is MySQL, and Intel hardware with Linux is being used, then a single-processor server with 512 MB of RAM will usually be adequate for the master server. However, heavy network monitor loads --- \ie monitoring a lot of network components at high frequency, and applying a large number of rules to each event --- will require fast processors on the Merce master server.

The configurations of slave servers depends totally on the intensity of use generated by your users. Some of the larger Merce sites have multiple servers per location, each server with four processors and 2 GB of RAM, to handle email and Web proxy loads of a few thousand users. With a large office, we have found that even the simple habit of setting up email clients to auto-check for new mail every ten minutes can add a lot of load on mailbox servers.

Smaller sites can have just a handful of users and hence low-end servers for that location's users. In such cases, an Intel system with a processor at 500 MHz and 128 MB of RAM may be adequate for an office of less than 50 users, depending on usage pattern.

The Merce software system comes with its own Installer, which is a configuration manager with a Web interface. This Installer not only guides you through the first-time installation, but also helps you to make configuration changes later, e.g. while adding a new slave server or enabling a new service.

However, Merce assumes that the underlying networking components of Unix or Linux are working and configured. The basic OS must be installed, and its IP networking layers must be correctly configured. For instance, you should be able to \comptxt{ping} one server from another even before Merce is installed. DNS must already be in place to allow name resolution before Merce can work. And so on.

Therefore, some very elementary knowledge of Linux and its networking components will be needed before Merce takes over. This knowledge is usually not needed once Merce is working, because ongoing routine configuration management can be handled by Merce.

Merce PSG or Merce Partners will undertake Merce installation as a separately priced service.

We already have an existing email system, based on XYZ. If we switch to Merce now, what will we do about existing mailboxes and users?

When you wish to migrate your existing email users to Merce, Merce PSG or Merce Partners will be ready to provide you a roadmap for the migration, as a separately priced services offering. We will study your existing system, including usage patterns, operating system dependencies, access methods, email address formats, Internet domain name structuring for your domain, etc. We will then give you a clear roadmap which an experienced engineering team can follow to migrate all your email, mailboxes and users from the legacy system to Merce. The actual migration can be undertaken by Merce PSG or our Partners, at additional cost.

The first deployment of Merce was with an organisation which had almost a thousand email users, all using Microsoft Mail running off Novell Netware servers. We migrated the email infrastructure for the entire organisation including four offices in three cities across two continents, in one week. We later also migrated the local address books, mailboxes and local mail folders of the users from the legacy system to our new Merce-based system. Some user re-training was required to teach them to shift from the MS Mail clients to Internet based email clients. The complete migration and user re-training assignment extended over about three months.

Not all levels of migration are possible from all legacy platforms to Merce on all platforms, but our roadmap will carry specific details of what is possible in your case.

And Merce is not just about email management, but we can discuss the other features elsewhere.