SherWeb

With email reigning the communication sphere in the business world, more and more organizations are moving away from managing their own email platforms and instead using services like Microsoft Exchange hosting to manage their backend needs.

With Microsoft Exchange as a hosted service a remote third party provider manages a company’s backend for a flat monthly fee. Exchange offers many capabilities including email, calendar, task management, address lists, and access to shared document repositories among other great functions.

Businesses can significantly reduce costs by choosing this approach. Intermedia, in collaboration with Osterman Research, published a White Paper in January 2010 which showed some very convincing evidence to support exchange hosting compared to on-premise management. They found that internal management costs can be reduced by more than 50% compared to on-premises management. This means more time for IT staff to focus on other projects.

Hosted exchange delivers many benefits to businesses and their clients. It helps outsource management duties, lower management costs, heighten security and provides more robust business continuity and data backup.

The White Paper provides some other very interesting insights on email usage, which helps to further drive the point of its importance to business.

Here are some highlights on the stats and numbers from the report:

• 97% of email users consider it to be important or extremely important in doing their work. By contrast, only 86% of users felt this strongly about the telephone, while 45% felt this strongly about IM capabilities.
• 81% of email users regularly check their work-related email from home on weekdays
• 78% do on weekends
• 60% do so on vacation
• Osterman Research estimates that the worldwide installed base for Microsoft exchange is 160 million users, making it the leading business-grade messaging system in use
• As of late 2009 there are roughly 10 million users of hosted Exchange worldwide up from 1.5 million seats in mid-2007

The White Paper also clears up a common misconception that hosted exchange is only useful or intended for small business needs, whereas mid-size to large businesses require on-premise exchange. However, larger organizations can benefit greatly from migrating to a hosted exchange model.

According to their findings, an on-site premise, 100-seat exchange deployment costs nearly $40 per seat per month over a three-year system lifetime. A 1,000 seat deployment costs just over $24 per seat per month. With a hosted service, it would cost about $14.45 for 100 users, and less than $11.00 for 1,000.

Hosted exchange savings end up being substantial, not to mention that leading providers include the licensing costs as part of their service.