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Email has become the single most important tool for business communication, period. In a recent King Research survey of mid-market IT professionals responsible for messaging systems, 96 percent of respondents
said email is important or extremely important and has a significant negative impact on business operations when not available. According to Osterman Research, one in five organizations believes a single major email outage could result in revenue losses up to $500,000. Even more telling is the claim by management consulting firm Eagle Rock Alliance that a whopping 40 percent of companies
that go more than 24 hours without access to their data go out of business. Out of business.
Given the above statistics, it’s not surprising that a 2006 Skillsoft survey found that 97 percent of IT pros report daily stress stemming from user complaints, managers and deadlines. And these are trained IT professionals, a staffing luxury that many smaller companies simply don’t have. For small-to-medium-sized businesses (SMBs), businesses with 500 and fewer employees, lucky enough to have an in-house IT team, keeping email up and running is just one of the many responsibilities these busy individuals must stay on top of, joining security, database, Web and network administration, to name but a few. In fact, managing Microsoft Exchange (the industry’s leading email, calendaring and unified messaging server) takes away from running the businesses’ core applications and prevents the IT manager from taking a strategic role in IT planning.
For companies with strapped and/or non-existent IT teams, outsourcing Microsoft Exchange can be an extremely smart, cost-effective option. Gartner predicts the market for hosted email relative to total email seats to grow to from its current 1 percent up to 20 percent by 2012, representing 40 million hosted mailboxes within the next four years.
While the hosted email market is indeed growing fast, a few stubborn myths continue to hold back many businesses from embracing it as a viable option to an in-house solution. In this article we will debunk those falsehoods one by one to show why a hosted Exchange model is the best choice for smaller organizations.
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