Should You Outsource Your Email?

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According to a recent study by Symantec and Gartner, most companies consider email to be a mission critical application. In addition, the study stated, up to 75% of a company's intellectual property resides in email and other messaging applications. Likewise, 75% of fortune 500 litigation involves email related discovery, and at the time of the study, 79% of companies accepted email messages as confirmation of transactions.

As critical as email is to most companies though, it is important to remember that a company's mail servers are a part of the company's infrastructure, and are not usually directly related to the products or services that the company offers to its customers.

To be successful, it is important for a company to focus as many of its resources as possible on the business itself, and its core competencies. In any business, a portion of the company's financial and human resources are invested in establishing and maintaining the company's underlying infrastructure (such as email, telephone, electricity, etc.). In most cases, this infrastructure is necessary for doing business, but does not directly produce revenue. In essence, the infrastructure is a necessary expense.

Read the Full Report (pdf format; 200kb).

Reducing the Cost of Your Messaging Infrastructure

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Email is absolutely critical in making users productive: for example, a February 2008 survey conducted by Osterman Research found that 93% of email users consider email to be important or critical in helping them to get their work done.

However, most decision makers are not aware of the true cost of providing email functionality to their users. Many underestimate these costs by a significant margin, and most are not confident that they can accurately determine them anyway. This leads to two significant and expensive problems:

• When the time comes for an infrastructure refresh, an inability to accurately determine the true cost of ownership for completing alternatives makes it more difficult to make the right choice among those alternatives.
• Organizations may be overpaying for providing email services by not considering hosted or other alternatives to their on-premise infrastructure.

Read the Full Report (pdf format; 734kb).