Posted on Thursday, August 14th, 2008 at 4:00 pm
Computing Magazine
Storm approaching email market as clouds gather on SaaS provision
The percentage of commercial mailboxes using a cloud-provisioned model will grow from the existing one per cent of enterprise seats to 20 per cent in 2012, says a report from Gartner. This push into the cloud email model will cause fundamental restructuring of the email market.
“As large suppliers push into the cloud email market, we will see a fundamental restructuring of the email market,” said Matthew Cain, research vice president at Gartner.
“Traditional, dedicated server model-hosting vendors will fare better based on their ability to offer larger-scale and more customised email. Traditional email software-as-a-service (SaaS) vendors will come under tremendous price pressure from mega-scale vendors,” he added.
Companies undergoing major email transitions could examine the cloud model for better email economics. “While large enterprises would not see substantial cost benefits, the cloud delivery model will enable them to redeploy their IT infrastructure, alter strategies to free up people and, most importantly, optimise user performance,” he added. Even businesses with complex topologies and those with less than 99 per cent uptime could consider this model to simplify support and improve uptime.
The research and advisory company predicts that the adoption of cloud email will start with small companies and move to mid-size companies, and by 2012 the model will serve the largest firms with more than 50,000 seats.
