It has been predicted that more data will be created in the next three years than has been in all of recorded history. In fact, talk to any storage company and they will tell you how data is increasing at a rapid rate, and the finger is soon pointed to e-mail.
We workers just love to write e-mails and forward them on to all of our co-workers and friends at large. Work presentations, family pics, and Kylie’s latest underwear advertisement all get passed around, much to the joy of network administrators who cope with decreased storage space and choking bandwidth. In fact, the latter can be such a problem that some companies have resorted to storing large e-mails and processing them after normal working hours.
But there are alternatives. For companies where e-mail is getting to be too time-consuming and arduous to manage, there is always the option of outsourcing. We seem to have taken to outsourcing many other parts of the business, such as customer service, Web sites, and communications infrastructure (just to name a few); why not outsource e-mail as well?
If you haven’t yet considered this avenue, well you aren’t alone. At the moment, e-mail outsourcing is such a non-entity that it isn’t even on analysts’ radar. Market statistics on the topic are harder to come by than chest hair on the members of Hanson. According to IDC analyst Andrew Milroy, e-mail outsourcing comes under the umbrella of application service providers (ASPs), and that model unfortunately didn’t really take off in Australia.
“Within the ASP model that people were talking about in the late ‘90s, one of the areas that was talked about was e-mail management,” says Milroy. “But ASPs never got the critical mass, it never hit the heights that we predicted and as a result a lot of pure ASP companies either went bust or they were acquired by the big guys.”
So where does that leave e-mail management? Well it is around, and many companies offer such services, from managed hosting companies such as WebCentral and Hostworks to outsourcing giants like CSC and IBM GSA. Even telcos such as Optus and Telstra are in on the action.
But the market in general is still in its infancy. So far it hasn’t become a standalone service in its own right, with the vast majority of customers only opting for e-mail management outsourcing as part of a larger outsourcing deal, for instance including it in a package deal along with Web hosting. In fact, in order for Telstra to manage your company’s e-mail services, you need to already be a customer of its Internet Direct offering, which provides broadband Internet access.
Marty Gauvin, Managing Director of Hostworks, says out of its 70 customers Hostworks manages e-mail for about 20 percent of them, and even then it is usually part of a larger package.
“While e-mail is certainly mission critical and is a vital service, there is usually something else that is also vital,” he explains. “We do applications management for virtually all of our customers, and [e-mail management] is a vital part of our services.”
One thing to look out for is which mail clients the service provider is offering. Microsoft Exchange is the flavour of the month, offering a range of special features, such as mobile connectivity but not all service providers are jumping on the Exchange bandwagon. Actually you might even have trouble finding support for Lotus Notes and Exchange.
According to Gauvin, there isn’t a large demand for these products as a lot of companies don’t have a need for advanced functions such as calendar and contacts management, let alone wireless functionality. Regarding the use of Exchange, Gauvin says: “There is quite a number of corporates that still use simple e-mail. Not many companies with less than a hundred mailboxes would use Exchange, in fact about a third of our users don’t use it. However, Exchange is gaining inroads into the corporate service.”
A quick round up of hosting companies revealed that demand currently isn’t high enough to warrant offering any more than standard e-mail services. Managed hosting company 90East (formerly Peakhour) offers e-mail management services but it doesn’t support either Microsoft Exchange or Lotus Notes.
WebCentral has only just launched its managed Exchange service and currently doesn’t offer support for Lotus Notes. Optus is a reseller of WebCentral’s services, and Telstra offers support for Outlook Express. Hostworks, on the other hand, offers Exchange, Lotus Notes, iPlanet, and iMail.
WebCentral’s CEO Lloyd Ernst says he is seeing interest in its new managed Exchange service; he rationalises that being a relatively new product there aren’t many people with ingrained Exchange skills. He is seeing IT managers who are limiting the functionality of the program because they don’t have either the time or the resources to manage it, so for companies such as this outsourcing makes sense. He is confident it will be a success: “The research that we have done so far has shown a lot of interest. We think this is going to be a winner for us.”
In contrast, David Yuille, CEO of managed hosting company 90East (formerly Peakhour) doesn’t think people are actually looking at outsourcing e-mail management at the moment, he does think that it lends itself well to being outsourced due to it being a well understood cost to the business. The hurdle for service providers is to counter the natural reluctance of businesses to outsource e-mail due to it being such a critical business tool.
IDC’s Milroy is predicting that e-mail management will take off but just not in the immediate future, saying it is probably a couple of years away yet. In his opinion, it will take a cultural change for companies to consider outsourcing their e-mail, which could explain why so few are at the moment. But he believes over time interest in it is bound to increase. Like other outsourcing decisions, Milroy predicts companies will eventually turn to it if only for the advantage of reducing the hassle of managing it themselves.
Gauvin agrees with Milroy, saying in his experience there is a tendency for companies to only outsource e-mail management when there is change, such as a merger or a substantial systems upgrade. Outsourcing in action
In this regard, Luke Traini of CMP Marketing is an exception to the rule. For him, it wasn’t a hard decision to opt for e-mail outsourcing for his company and it wasn’t brought about by company change. Being a marketing consultancy which focuses on the hospitality and gaming industries, the nature of the work means a lot of the staff at CMP work on clients’ sites where, according to Traini, they often encounter difficulties navigating various PABX systems.
Seeking a better solution, Traini conducted research about four months ago first considering the option of building a more robust system in-house. As it turned out that option was too expensive and CMP management baulked at the cost of forking out thousands for software licences and servers.
Already a customer of WebCentral for the last two and a half years for basic Web and intranet hosting, Milroy looked at what the provider could offer.
WebCentral’s Exchange offering seemed to fit the bill, both in cost and functionality, so Traini decided to upgrade from its current POP 3 mail accounts and trial the Exchange service in its Queensland office before rolling it out in other states.
At the time of writing CMP has been using WebCentral’s Exchange service for eight weeks, and so far so good. The company isn’t locked into a contract and instead of forking out thousands to build in-house systems, it pays a monthly fee of $19.95 per user which includes a licence to use Outlook on local PCs and Outlook Internet access. For a company of its size, only 10 people in the Queensland office and another 31 throughout Australia and New Zealand, it has worked out to be quite cost effective.
“We use Microsoft Exchange to manage and delegate workflow,” says Traini. “We really like it … one problem was that we had multiple databases everywhere, but over the first few weeks we worked at sharing group tasks and have integrated all of the databases into one.”
But Traini seems to be in a unique position; seeing as CMP isn’t locked into a contract and doesn’t have an SLA. For most corporations this wouldn’t be the recommended way to go. You should definitely ensure there is a solid SLA in place, and make sure it is tailored for the needs of the company.
Yuille says having an SLA in place is crucial and advises to account for transit time as well as up time—it is all well and good to have an e-mail system that is constantly up and running, but what is the point if e-mails are taking hours to hit your inbox?
But as with any outsourcing deal, you should talk to your provider as it will have the most experience in building SLAs—it is in both of your interests to have the appropriate one set in place, as you don’t want shoddy service and they don’t want to miss performance targets and encounter penalties.
