E-mail and the cloud
IT research and advisory specialists Gartner today predicted that with Google, Yahoo, Dell and Microsoft (MS) all making major investments in cloud computing, large companies will follow the lead set by SMBs and move their mailboxes to the software as a service (SaaS) model.
Gartner Research VP Matthew Cain said that demand will be led by companies with fewer than a thousand seats, which have the highest costs associated with e-mail. Those with geographically spread, ad hoc networks, and less than full-time users also have much to gain, he added.
However, Gartner predicts a rapid rise in momentum as even firms with more than 50,000 seats adopt SaaS as their e-mail solution, and that by 2012 around 20 percent of commercial mailboxes will have moved to the cloud.
On the supply side, the pioneers “will come under tremendous price pressure from mega-scale vendors,” said Cain. “Established traditional dedicated server model hosting vendors will fare better, based on their ability to offer larger-scale and more-customized e-mail.”
As licensing and operational costs reduce, Gartner believes the biggest cost for enterprise e-mail operations over the next 10 years will be level-one help desk support.
Press release: Gartner Says E-Mail Will Lead the Charge Into Mainstream Adoption of Cloud Computing
