October 05, 2009

Get out of the e-mail business

With Lotus Live iNotes, IBM is the latest to offer a cheap alternative to locally maintained mail servers

It's time for e-mail to go. Out of the datacenter, pronto. Get the hand trucks, hold the door, and roll those mail servers outta here. E-mail is a storage hog, a time-suck to manage, a compliance liability, and about the least strategic thing imaginable. It's one of the few "services" that seems absolutely perfect for the cloud: a commodity with a well-known, pedestrian set of expectations. Please, let somebody else handle it.

That's why I was excited to hear about Lotus Live iNotes, just launched by IBM. This makes IBM the third major vendor of hosted enterprise e-mail, following Microsoft and Google.

[ For InfoWorld's ongoing coverage of cloud services and how they integrate with the enterprise, read David Linthicum's Cloud Computing blog. ]

It strikes me that IBM stands to be a pretty strong player in this space. Gmail has struggled with outages and its Premier version must overcome a consumer identity. Both Microsoft and its partners offer hosted versions of Exchange, but you don't hear a lot about that, thanks to Redmond's Hamlet-like ambivalence about the cloud and what it might do to its fatware business.

IBM has no such baggage -- or at least very little of it -- and until it has its own inevitable outage episodes, Lotus Live iNotes can leverage IBM's reputation for "reliability" and "security" (IBM's words) in the enterprise. When I talked with Sean Poulley, Lotus' vice president of online collaboration services, he reminded me that IBM already has a $20 billion dollar business running its customers' IT operations.

Of course, going with IBM does mean you have to use Notes, albeit the iNotes Web version. The good news is that Notes Version 8, upon which iNotes is based, is much improved over earlier versions. Plus the price of the iNotes service is right: $3 per month per seat if you prepay annually ($3.75 if you pay month to month). This is similar to Microsoft's Deskless Worker offering, which provides half the storage (500MB instead of 1GB) for $2 per user per month. Gmail Premier costs $50 per seat per year, with big fat 25GB for each account.

Yet IBM downplays the idea of replacing locally installed e-mail across the board. Poulley demurs when asked if he thinks we're at a tipping point yet on cloud e-mail for business, suggesting that Lotus Live iNotes primarily targets SMBs and/or companies with workers who spend little time at their desks. Moreover, he says, Notes is a collaborative platform that goes way beyond e-mail to integrate with business process, which can't be as effectively accomplished with the online version.

Whatever. I just want e-mail to be isolated as an enterprise-class cloud service, with all the modern archiving and anti-spam and compliance features you could ask for and a massively scalable underlying server infrastructure IT never has to worry about. Why is that so hard? Yes, I know some companies can't outsource messaging for compliance reasons. But for everyone else, the time has come to show e-mail the door.

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cnouri 5-Oct-09 8:08am
Couldn't agree more. A business that spends lots of time and money on running email is not increasing the value for their business (Unless you are an email hosting provider of course). Businesses should focus on what their core competencies to help increase their value. Moving your email to the cloud can be a great first step to reducing your IT spend and headaches. (Full Disclosure -- I work at Rackspace which provides business email hosting to over 1.4 million users)
Archives1 5-Oct-09 11:59am
1 reply
The Cloud may be the best place to have your e-mail hosted. should you choose this avenue to reduce costs. There are a number of questions you will need to answer. Here are 10 questions your organization will need to answer. 1. Do you have a records/information management and retention policies in place to deal with e-mails that conduct the organization's business? 2. Are there HIPAA and PII considerations which will require us to insure our data is maintained in within the geographic limitations placed on us? Where are the servers located? 3. Will the host be able to provide the security needed for international, Federal, state and local statutory and regulatory requirements? 4. Who owns the data? 5. What are the disaster recovery plans for the host? 6. Can we do our own disaster recovery testing? 7. Will the e-mail be managed by missive content and information life cycle. 8. How are the e-mail disposed of at the end of their life cycle, and will there be a way of documenting the destruction? 9. How are we notified should there be a breach in security. 10. What are the liability limits the host has? Answering these and other organization specific questions will lead you to the best solution to whether your organization should use the cloud in its business.
MobileAdmin 5-Oct-09 6:46pm
Companies usually get to #3 and decide to keep email inhouse and stay with Notes / Exchange. The cloud is a fantastic option for small/med business but enterprise wants to keep control of their data no matter how attractive a lower CAL cost is. Add all the extras these services often whack you for and your cost is usually equal or more then you already have.
ChrisDamvakaris 6-Oct-09 6:38am
1 reply
Any company that is still trying to manage their email internally is wasting money. The security, speed, and reliability of the leading hosted services vendors’ networks make it an easy decision to move email to the cloud. Having someone else deal with the day-to-day management, upgrades, and patches frees up internal IT resources to focus on strategic initiatives that increase productivity or revenue. I disagree that IBM iNotes will challenge Microsoft’s Exchange. Native integration points into additional communication and collaboration productivity tools such as Web conferencing, secure Instant Message (for the compliance issues you mentioned), and SharePoint give Exchange a lead that IBM won’t be able to close. (In the interest of full disclosure, as the poster above did, I also work with a hosted services company – Apptix, the largest hosted Exchange provider in the world.)
jqp123 6-Oct-09 8:18am
"The security, speed, and reliability of the leading hosted services vendors’ networks make it an easy decision to move email to the cloud." That's easy to say but can/will you guarantee it? If not, then maybe the decision isn't really so easy.

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