AppAssure — first working version of the Microsoft Exchange recovery engine, later sold to Dell

What we did

Ian participated as one of two developers building the data recovery layer for Microsoft Exchange, after multiple prior teams had failed to crack it. The problem: MS Exchange had no documented or extractable format for emails stored in the database, so the team had to reverse-engineer the binary format from the hexadecimal files themselves.

Outcome

Three-tiered application — DLL, task queue layer, and UI — that read emails out of corrupt disk data. The company was sold to Dell six years later at an approximate valuation of $130M.