I recently received a review copy of a useful new
Forrester report, Four Giants Compete For Your Cloud Email
Business
by Ted Schadler, that has a cost breakdown of cloud-based email services from
the four leading vendors- Google, Microsoft, IBM and Cisco - and indicates that
Google and Microsoft are in the lead for customers. Here is a good overview in
Ted’s words from the executive summary.
“Google jumped into
the enterprise email market in 2007 with a $50 annual subscription to its cloud
email service and turned the market upside down. Microsoft quickly re-evaluated
and repriced its Exchange Online offering to $5 per user per month; IBM
launched LotusLive Notes and iNotes for $5 and $3, respectively; and Cisco
purchased PostPath and opened its WebEx Mail offering with a 5 GB mailbox for
$5 per user per month. Each of these big four collaboration vendors has since
beefed up and clarified its road map for cloud email and collaboration services.
Their email offerings are rapidly approaching feature and price parity — at
least on the checklist items.”
Since I became an enterprise of one in 2004, I
missed these most recent corporate email wars. My last employer moved from
Notes to Outlook but Google had not yet turned the market upside down. Now both
Google and Microsoft have bundled in their Web productivity apps, something
that IBM and Cisco do not. Cisco allows you to use Outlook.
Over
the next five years, Ted writes, enterprises will be re-evaluating their email
strategy and partner. For vendors, it will be a tough five years as companies
pick a messaging and collaboration partner for the next decade. Ted gives a
nice way to estimate your total email costs that appear to be significantly
cheaper in the cloud. However, there are migration costs to get there.
Forrester also expects
that email will improve it gains features that improve usability and
functionality such as: “analytics to perform triage on messages; collaboration
features to make it easier to act on a message; in-message widgets to pull
information relevant to the message; pushbutton publishing to a team wiki;
messages, activities, feeds, tweets, etc., in a single inbox; and so on.” This is good news and another alignment
with the enterprise concept that suggests it is becoming standard. Many of the
collaboration platforms already allow you to use them within an email client so
this is going in the other direction but likely focused on the tools offered by
the email provider.
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