The Message Bus Blog

I was part of the founding team of Twitter and the Director of Operations where I built and led the team which built and supported the back-end technology. The challenges of serving web pages at scale, maintaining the social graph, and supporting new use cases were all tough, but messaging was the biggest challenge by far. Specifically email messaging. It’s hard enough to wrap your mind around sending 100 million legitimate messages in a day, but it’s even harder when recipient domains interpret your behavior as spam or fraud and then blacklist you across the board.

At Message Bus, we’re applying the lessons learned scaling a cloud leveraged platform to create the first cloud-native application service for messaging across established and emerging channels.

When we were looking at where to start with messaging, we chose email. Why? Because if you add up all the other message types such as sms, APN, and social, the annual volume of those message types combined does not come close to the total volume of legitimate email sent today. Real business happens on email and it’s a multi-billion dollar market. But it’s a market where there hasn’t been serious innovation for some time.

Current email sending practices are similar to CB radio – where the sender blasts a message out and hopes someone receiving the message on the other end answers. CB radio is old school technology and has largely been replaced by mobile phones – a system where recipients decide whether and how to have a conversation.

Message Bus is replacing the old school approach where senders simply hope a message was received to a data driven approach where we actively manage the relationship between senders and recipients. With email, your reputation is only as good as the last message you have sent, and in the highly competitive and often abusive/adversarial relationship between senders and recipients, it is very easy to make mistakes where you are suddenly viewed as a bad sender. And surprisingly, the data is there – if you as a sender choose to collect and act upon it. Further, good actors should be rewarded just as bad actors are punished.

In addition, our architecture and model of delivery is different from anyone in the market – including cloud vendors, or more appropriately, the cloud-washed vendors in the market today. When you look at the infrastructure powering messaging, there’s a massive install base of old school technology that’s not purpose-built for the cloud, primed for replacement. The opportunity spans enterprises, email service providers, and a variety of application platforms as all face the same hurdles: large CAPEX, brittle technology, expensive to build and operate, and capacity constrained.

We’re building the next generation of services for the cloud – cloud-native application services. They’re the next big thing for the cloud after SaaS, IaaS and PaaS. Some of the best investors in the cloud are placing their bets on us because they believe in the opportunity for this next generation of services for the cloud.

In the same way people think Amazon Web Services for cloud compute and Dropbox for cloud storage, we want Message Bus to be viewed as synonymous with email and mobile messaging.

To learn more visit http://www.messagebus.com.

Jeremy LaTrasse
CEO and Co-Founder
Message Bus