Managed Services and Enterprise E-mail

Blogger: Bill Pray

Because of the market noise around SaaS e-mail and current economic conditions, many enterprises are evaluating the possibilities (per several recent interviews with enterprise IT decision makers). Cisco, Google, IBM, Microsoft, and Yahoo! have all announced their intention to offer or new SaaS e-mail offerings in the last few months.

But the SaaS e-mail is still immature in many ways and many enterprises are wary. There is another option that enterprises can consider.

Managed services permit the enterprise to keep the e-mail service on-premise and completely under the enterprise's control but outsources the monitoring, maintenance, and management of the system to a third party.

The most significant benefit touted by managed services providers is the reduction of headcount required for the e-mail system by the enterprise. For example, one company was able to reduce the number of Exchange administrators from eight to one by going to a managed services model. Managed services also offers advantages in that there are little or no costs or concerns about migration, deployment, and network connectivity.

Because the managed services provider provides the expertise as part of an SLA, managed services also relieve the enterprise from having to keep up with upgrades, patches, and hotfixes. The SLA also insures the managed services provider takes care of monitoring, regular storage & backups, anti-virus and anti-spam, and disaster recovery.

All of these advantages come at a price. Managed services can be more expensive on the bottom line. Managed services still require the enterprise to provide the infrastructure - hardware, software, licensing, network, connectivity, etc., in addition to paying for the third party management services (generally, a subscription model). One of the drawbacks can be the licensing. The enterprise still has to assess, negotiate, and purchase the needed licenses. Security and compliance are less of an issue, but could be a problem if concerned about the managed service provider's access to e-mail content.

Perhaps the most significant issue is that enterprise e-mail should really be an application in the collaboration platform or environment and not many managed service providers can manage the entire collaboration environment at a reasonable cost for the enterprise. But, if the enterprise is investigating SaaS e-mail, good due diligence dictates evaluating the possibility of using managed services in the mix. 

Comments

[Kare Anderson]

Spot on!
My money quote from your post: enterprise e-mail should really be an application in the collaboration platform or environment and not many managed service providers can manage the entire collaboration environment at a reasonable cost for the enterprise.