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General Information
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September 5, 2008
• Vol.30 Issue 36
Page(s) 23 in print issue
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Cloud-Based Email
Developing Technology Offers Sunny Skies To SME IT Departments
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SMEs agree that email management—including server maintenance and upgrades, storage, and archiving—is a necessary evil. Providing and maintaining their own email infrastructures costs time and money and turns IT’s attention from the primary business.
That’s part of why Gartner predicts that email using a cloud approach will grow from 1% of the market, where it is today, to about 20% of the market by 2012, according to Matt Cain, research vice president at Gartner. Small companies, which have had the worst economics for premises-based email, will get the most out of moving their mailboxes into the cloud, Cain explains.
 Email Clouds Are Forming
Cloud-based email is growing. Consumer email services from vendors such as Google, Yahoo!, and Hotmail have 200 million-plus active users, according to Cain. A clear victory in the consumer market has vendors reasoning that they will be successful with commercial email, as well.
The attraction, especially for SMEs, is saving money and offloading the management headaches of an onsite mail server onto a cloud service provider. Management is a big part of having an onsite mail system. Keeping up a server, preparing for disaster recovery—these things have fixed costs. “Those fixed costs are much higher for SMEs because they are spreading it out over a limited, fixed number of seats,” says Tyrone Pike, founder and chief executive officer of Cemaphore (www.cemaphore.com), a provider of email continuity and Exchange migration based on cloud email. “If they are going to roll out Exchange for 300 users, for example, their unit cost is going to be pretty high,” Gartner’s Cain agrees.
Part of that cost is staffing an Exchange expert to manage that server. SMEs require that expertise to make upgrades. “Companies with 500 users are struggling with upgrades to Exchange 2007 because it’s a 64-bit model; it’s got new compliance elements and new high availability, disaster recovery, and storage topologies and features,” says Cain. SMEs may not be able to afford that expertise, and they probably don’t just happen to have someone who can do that. “That leads them again to the hosting (cloud) model,” says Cain.
Email Management Metamorphosis
Cloud vendors are starting to offer SLAs (service-level agreements) for cloud email to ensure reliability, says Pike. As for options, SMEs maintain control over mailbox provisioning and other features while sending responsibility for server and infrastructure management into the cloud. It’s up to the customers which advanced functions they would like to have access to, according to Rishi Chandra, product manager for the Google Apps Enterprise Edition at Google Enterprise (www.google.com/enterprise).
For user provisioning, for example, enterprises plug their LDAP servers into the cloud using APIs, or they use the service’s administrative console to provision users so they don’t have to use administrative interfaces, Chandra explains. SMEs have the option to deprovision mailboxes and archive email via a Web platform, as well, says Pike.
With cloud email, enterprises preserve their domain names and maintain other features such as support for POP or IMAP email, according to Farzin Arsanjani, president of HyperOffice (www.hyperoffice.com). Additionally, cloud email vendors are supporting mobile devices and offering other features to address customer demand, says Max Hoberman, president and creative director of Certain Affinity (www.certainaffinity.com), the video game developer behind Halo and a cloud email customer.
Impact On SMEs
SMEs have no additional time or resources to invest in email infrastructure, according to Chandra. With cloud email, they don’t have to make those investments. The cloud reduces complexity and enables them to provision hundreds of accounts in literally no time. “That’s a huge value proposition for small companies that don’t have any time,” Chandra says.
The cloud frees up personnel who are dedicated to email today to focus on activities that contribute to the bottom line, and it brings commercial-quality email within reach of companies of any size—even those that have no IT departments.
The cloud lets SMEs outsource that mail system to someone who has a lot more experience managing email than they have, says Cemaphore’s Pike. The enterprise doesn’t have to keep pace with the constant attacks on email security; cloud vendors address spam, viruses, spyware, and access rights in the cloud before it gets to the inbox, adds HyperOffice’s Arsanjani.
Cloud email enables employees to access their email from anywhere, on their own domain, through synchronization technologies. "I used to drag my laptop with me everywhere to get frequent email access," says Certain Affinity's Hoberman. With cloud email, that’s no longer an issue.
Commercial cloud email intends to compete with in-house mail infrastructure head-on with speedy provisioning, flexibility and choice, and no management headaches. As enterprises rely on these services and weigh in with their demands, the cloud will thicken with time and customer-tested email solutions. 
by David Geer
Cloud Email & Collaborative Tools
Many cloud email offerings come as part of online collaboration tool packages. Here’s what an SME might expect or want to look for when considering a vendor, based on input from our sources.
• Calendars that synchronize with popular software such as Microsoft Exchange or Outlook and make sharing calendars across a user base easy and efficient.
• Project management tools
• Contact management tools
• Word processing
• Internet telephone
• Web conferencing |
When SMEs Manage Mail
“Managing an email server is not an easy task to start with,” says Farzin Arsanjani, president of HyperOffice (www.hyperoffice.com). For SMEs at the crossroads of choosing between in-house and outsourced email, here’s what they have to look forward to when maintaining their own server.
• 24-hour support. “Email is an application that is used almost every minute of the working day by every employee—and after hours,” says Arsanjani.
• Keeping up with the evolution of the technology. SMEs must keep pace with new email technologies that come online, Arsanjani adds.
• Dedicating certain staff members exclusively to email.
• The potential for server abandonment. “Because SMEs don’t have the resources, because they often don’t have the time to take care of it, the server becomes abandoned, plagued with spam and viruses,” says Arsanjani. The SME’s primary business starts to take off, and they have to make a choice. The only clear choice is for the business over the email server.
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