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If your company hosts its email outside your organisation, you’ve joined a fast growing club. Several industry reports have been released forecasting strong growth in companies out sourcing their email/messaging requirements to specialist hosting companies.
One report from Radicati expects the business market to grow to 59 million accounts by 2008, an increase of 51 per cent in 4 years.
In another from Osterman Research, the average email user sends and receives a median of 85 emails in a typical day, sends 17% more and 25% more emails in 2006 compared to 2005, classifies 56% of the email they receive as critical and spends 34% of their day working in an email client.
The factors driving the urge to outsource email? Radicati believes they are storage pressures, compliance requirements and spam and virus problems. Also a lot of industry experts believe that Microsoft’s Exchange 2003 product is a driver for the hosted business email market. Exchange makes hosting business email more efficient and affordable for small to medium enterprises.
There are several compelling arguments for companies to outsource their messaging systems according to Bill Unsworth, chairman of Simply Mail Solutions “SMEs are better off with a hosted solution. A simple £5.99/user/month cost buys them enterprise class collaborative email with anti-spam, anti-virus, guaranteed uptime and plenty of storage. In addition they don’t have to worry about upgrading to the latest and greatest messaging system, because providers generally have to stay on top of that due to competitive pressures. Add to that the costs of installing an in-house system and hiring one or more administrators to manage and maintain the system.”
Whilst larger businesses are typically more sensitive about giving control of email to a 3rd party, he believes that spam and security related issues are drivers of hosted email solutions as the complexity of in-house messaging solutions grows. “more and more companies are saying ‘forget it, let’s outsource all this’”
SMS is a new hosted email provider located in Warrington, Cheshire and offers Microsoft Exchange amongst its product portfolio.
Bill Unsworth is well known in the industry and initiated and was a founder of U-NET one of the very first UK ISP’s and MANAP the Manchester based Internet Exchange Point where ISP’s exchange traffic which is an important but invisible part of the infrastructure of the UK Internet.
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bil[.]simplymailsolutions.com 
