Why Now is the Time to Consider an Alternative Email Platform

Why Now is the Time to Consider an Alternative Email System

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An Osterman Research White Paper Published March 2010

SPONSORED BY

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Tel: +1 253 630 5839 • Fax: +1 253 458 0934 • [email protected] • www.ostermanresearch.com

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Why Now is the Time to Consider an Alternative Email Platform

©2010 Osterman Research, Inc. 1

Why You Should Read This White Paper Email is pervasive, used by virtually every business and by the vast majority of individuals who have any interface with a computer. Consider that: • Email is the primary communications system in most organizations, viewed by users

to be more important than the telephone, instant messaging and fax.

• Users spend more than one-quarter of their day doing something in their email client.

• Nearly three-quarters of the content that users communicate is sent through email.

• It is the primary method for sending files and has become the single largest

repository of business records in most organizations.

• Email is one of the most expensive applications that IT manages. For example, an organization of 1,000 users will pay in excess of $24 per seat per month for email, or nearly $300,000 per year; smaller organizations pay even higher costs per seat.

In short, email has become something of a utility like electricity – an absolutely essential tool that users and organizations cannot live without, yet an expensive capability that offers few differentiating advantages even for companies that manage it well. Most organizations today use Microsoft Exchange, IBM Lotus Notes/Domino or Novell GroupWise for their email, calendaring and other requirements. While these platforms provide very good performance and are provided by solid vendors, they often are more expensive to deploy and manage than many “alternative” platforms, such as those discussed in this white paper. However, companies that have migrated to a leading alternative email platform have given up nothing in terms of functionality – these systems offer robust email, calendaring, contact management, task management and other capabilities, all while preserving the integrity of the user experience and dramatically lowering the cost of email. THERE IS DEMAND FOR ALTERNATIVES The goal then, is to deploy an email system that is highly reliable, meets current and future needs, and can be managed as inexpensively as possible. While most organizations are not using alternative email platforms, many are open to doing so. For example, in a survey that Osterman Research conducted in November and December 2009, we asked “if you could replace your backend messaging infrastructure with one that provided significantly better performance, server loading, lower costs or other significant advantages, but that allowed you to keep your current desktop clients, how likely would you be to switch”? We found that 42% of decision makers indicated that

Osterman Research found that 42% of decision

makers indicated that they would likely or definitely

make the switch to an alternative vendor, while

another 34% were open to the idea of migrating.



they would likely or definitely make the switch to an alternative vendor, while another 34% were open to the idea of migrating. The bottom line is clear: organizations need email, they need to spend less on it, and they are open to ways of doing that. ABOUT THIS WHITE PAPER This white paper discusses the high costs of managing email and the benefits that organizations can realize if they migrate to an alternative vendor. The paper also briefly discusses the offerings from two leading alternative vendors, Ipswitch and Mirapoint.

The Benefits and Problems of Email EMAIL IS STILL THE BACKBONE OF COMMUNICATIONS Email is vital to the individuals who use it and the organizations that deploy it for their employees. Consider the following: • In the business email market, there are roughly 160 million users or licensees of

Microsoft Exchange, 125 million users of IBM Lotus Notes/Domino and 30 million users of Novell GroupWise. Add to that the tens of millions of users of business email served by Google, Gordano, Ipswitch, Kerio, Messaging Architects, Mirapoint, VMware and many, many other vendors.

• An Osterman Research survey conducted in September 20091 found that 81% of

email users regularly check their work-related email from home on weekdays, 78% do on weekends and 60% while on vacation.

• The survey also found that despite the growth of alternative communication tools

like Twitter and Facebook, 45% report that over the past six to twelve months their use of email is increasing.

• A May 2009 Osterman Research survey2 found that 97% of email users consider

email 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 instant messaging capabilities.

EMAIL IS WHERE USERS SPEND THEIR DAY Email is the most commonly used application used by corporate employees; consider the following from an Osterman Research study: • Email users spend an average of 152 minutes on a typical day working in their email

client, or 28% of their nine hour, nine minute workday. Compare this with their use of the Web at 138 minutes per day (23%), attending in-person meetings (13%) and talking on the phone (12%).

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• Further, email users spend only 13% of their time on a typical day not working on a computing platform of some kind, whether it’s a desktop computer, laptop computer, smartphone, etc.

• Slightly more than one-half of email users report that more than a quarter of the

information they need to do their work can be found somewhere in their email system.

EMAIL IS EXPENSIVE Despite the fact that email is so widely deployed and offered by a large number of vendors, leading solutions tend to be quite expensive to deploy and manage. For example, Osterman Research estimates that Exchange and Notes/Domino, the most widely deployed email platforms in North America, cost more than $24 per seat per month to deploy and manage over a three-year lifecycle. While both platforms offer very good functionality and are provided by leading vendors with a long track record of innovation and solid performance, these solutions are relatively expensive to deploy and manage. To demonstrate the costs of operating an email system for organizations of various sizes, Osterman Research has built a cost model for Exchange and presented the results in the table below.

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There are two key takeaways from this table: • Not surprisingly, the cost of email goes down dramatically as more users are added

to the system.

• Even in a large organization of 1,000 users, email is still quite expensive.

Why Consider an Alternative Email Solution? Why should any organization consider an alternative to the email system they currently have installed, such as Exchange? There are a variety of reasons to consider a different vendor. YOU CAN GET THE SAME OR BETTER FUNCTIONALITY A corporate email platform needs to do several things, including the ability to send and receive email, maintain individual and group calendars, provide contact management and task management capabilities, encrypt outbound content, archive content, maintain robust defenses against spam and malware, and allow users to access these capabilities via a thick client (most often Microsoft Outlook) and a Web browser. While leading systems like Exchange perform these functions very well, many other platforms also provide all of these capabilities. For example, Ipswitch IMail Server and Mirapoint Message Server, the email platforms offered by the two sponsors of this report, Ipswitch and Mirapoint, respectively, provide all of the functions discussed above, including support for Outlook or your favorite desktop client. This means that the user email experience will remain virtually unchanged – a critical consideration as discussed above – but the IT experience will be significantly enhanced, as discussed below. YOU CAN REDUCE YOUR COSTS AND INCREASE FLEXIBILITY Another important benefit (arguably the most important benefit) provided by the use of an alternative email platform is a much lower cost of ownership on a number of levels: • Lower labor costs

Labor costs represent anywhere from 58% to 88% of the three-year total cost of ownership for an email system as shown in the table above. Because many alternative email systems require significantly less administrator involvement, the labor cost associated with managing email can be significantly reduced with an alternative email platform.

• Lower licensing costs

The licensing costs for servers are typically lower with alternatives, as well. While

Because many alternative email systems require

significantly less administrator

involvement, the labor cost associated with

managing email can be significantly reduced with

an alternative email platform.



the license cost for an email server distributed over a large user base over a three-year period may represent a relatively low cost per user on a monthly, licensing costs are a substantial up-front investment that can typically be reduced when using alternative email platforms.

• More flexibility in the backend infrastructure

Some alternative email platforms provide a wider variety of operating system and hardware options on which the email server software can be deployed, resulting in reduced costs for the backend infrastructure.

• More flexibility for users

While most users opt to use Outlook as their client of choice for email, alternative platforms typically support both Outlook and a variety of Web browsers. To be fair, Microsoft Outlook Web Access (OWA) can also be accessed using a number of different browsers, but the full functionality of OWA is available only when using Microsoft Internet Explorer.

YOU WON’T RISK ANYTHING LEAVING THE “ROADMAP” One of the key concerns that many decision makers express when considering an alternative email platform is that they will leave the “roadmap” of the vendor they are currently using, effectively cutting them off from the features and functions that will be provided in future versions of the platform they are using. However, decision makers concerned about leaving the roadmap of a market-leading vendor should consider the following: • Leading email platform vendors continually develop their solutions and offer

enhanced functionality over time – but so do vendors of alternative email platforms. The decision, then, is not to stay with Vendor A’s roadmap or abandon future enhancements to email, but instead deciding if Vendor A or Vendor B has the better long term roadmap (along with the lower costs and greater flexibility that can be realized today).

• When considering any vendor’s roadmap, it is important to consider all of the

ramifications that might be involved. For example, Exchange 2007 offered a number of important and useful features. However, it also required migration to 64-bit hardware that was not common at the time. The result was a significant improvement in email performance, coupled with a requirement to make major investments in new hardware and an inability to repurpose existing, 32-bit server hardware. Similarly, Exchange 2010 now includes native email archiving, an important and useful new capability in Exchange. However, the archiving functionality in Exchange 2010 requires use of Outlook 2010, deployment of which will take years to implement in some companies.

• Many large organizations are using alternative email systems, including NASA,

Mitsubishi Motors, the Boston Public School system, ITT Tech, the US Department of Homeland Security, Volkswagen, the US Department of the Navy, the Boston Celtics,



the North Orange County Community College District, Toro, Harvard Medical School and the University of Georgia, among many others. Use of an alternative email vendor does not mean that you’re blazing a trail where others have not gone.

The bottom line is that switching to an alternative email platform offered by a vendor with a solid track record of innovation does not carry with it any more risk than staying with a leading vendor.

What You Should Look For in an Alternative Platform Any email platform, whether it’s the one you’re currently using or an alternative that you might be considering, should meet all of your current, anticipated and even unanticipated requirements in the context of total cost of ownership, performance, features, functions and abilities to help you comply with the growing variety of legal and regulatory requirements you face. Here are some important things to consider when evaluating alternative email platforms (and your current solution). ROBUST AND SCALABLE MESSAGING BACKEND Any email platform should support a reasonable number of mailboxes per server. While there are no hard and fast rules about the minimum number of mailboxes that a server should support, a higher server loading will result in fewer physical servers or appliances that are required to operate an email infrastructure. Reducing the number of servers typically will result in significantly lower IT labor costs, since there will simply be less infrastructure that administrators must deploy, configure, patch, restore, etc. Reducing the number of physical servers can also result in significant power reductions, potentially saving thousands of dollars per year in power costs. There are a number of questions that should also be asked when considering any email vendor: • How much unplanned downtime does the

server experience? • How much planned downtime is required for

maintenance, patch management, etc.? • What is the sustained and peak throughput of the platform? • How scalable is the system overall and per server? • Can the server run on any of several different operating systems, or is a specific

operating system required?

Many large organizations are using alternative email

systems, including NASA, Mitsubishi Motors, the

Boston Public School system, ITT Tech, the US Department of Homeland

Security, Volkswagen, the US Department of the

Navy, the Boston Celtics, the North Orange County

Community College District, Toro, Harvard

Medical School and the University of Georgia.



• If you’re evaluating an email appliance, what operating system does it use? • Can your email servers run in a virtualized environment? If so, which one(s)? ROBUST AND INTEGRATED SECURITY CAPABILITIES Any email infrastructure must protect users from the growing onslaught of spam, malware, phishing attempts and other increasingly nasty stuff that enters through email. It must also protect the organization from sensitive content that leaves the organization through email. Key questions to ask of an email platform vendor include: • What inbound security tools are provided as part of the email platform offering?

What outbound tools are provided?

• Are reputation services available to provide protection at the edge of the network, or does all spam and malware processing take place at the email server?

• What are the spam and malware capture and false positive rates? • Are these tools homegrown or provided by third parties? • Can users access their own quarantined emails and do administrators have the

option of turning this capability on or off for certain users? Of course, you can use any hosted, appliance-based or server-based security tools you’d like with any email server you choose. However, if the email platform vendor offers robust and reliable capabilities as part of their offering, this can speed the deployment of the system you choose and drive down the total cost of ownership. SUPPORT FOR MOBILE MESSAGING The growing use of smartphones means that users in organizations of all sizes will rely on their mobile devices as a primary way of accessing corporate email. This requires an email solution to interface seamlessly with mobile platforms and protocols, most often BlackBerry Enterprise Server and ActiveSync. While BlackBerry support is important given that BlackBerry is the dominant mobile platform in use today, ActiveSync support is becoming increasingly important to support not only Windows Mobile devices, but also the iPhone. ABILITY TO ENCRYPT CONTENT Email messages and files that are not encrypted are sent in clear text or some other easily readable form, which allows them to be intercepted – either with malicious intent or accidentally – when, for example, an email or file is sent to the wrong person. This is akin to writing and mailing a postcard with the contents exposed to everyone handling the card during its journey to the recipient. Hackers and others with malicious intent can intercept email messages and read them simply by placing packet sniffers on the network. Any email platform, therefore, must allow content to be encrypted easily and with a minimum of intervention.



SUPPORT FOR MICROSOFT OUTLOOK A critical consideration for any email solution is its ability to support the de facto standard client, Microsoft Outlook. Osterman Research has found that the vast majority of organizations will not consider a newer, faster, cheaper or otherwise better email backend if it requires them to switch desktop clients. Because that client is Outlook in more than 60% of organizations, any email platform must permit the use of Outlook, preferably without a plug-in. AN “OUTLOOK-LIKE” EXPERIENCE IN A BROWSER Similarly, an email platform should offer a Webmail client that is least similar to OWA, the de facto standard for Webmail in corporate environments. While Outlook itself should be supported as noted above, the much lower use of OWA compared to Outlook means that vendors of an email solution will meet the bulk of demand by providing a Webmail experience that merely mimics OWA. The advantage of an OWA-like experience – as opposed to OWA itself – is that it gives users and organizations more flexibility in their choice of Web browser. SUPPORT FOR EMAIL ARCHIVING Email archiving has become a necessity for a variety of reasons: to satisfy regulatory compliance obligations that require retention of business records stored in email, to meet legal obligations to retain emails in support of e-discovery and other litigation-related activities, to improve the performance of email servers by reducing the amount of “live” content they maintain, and to provide a repository of content for data mining purposes, among other reasons. Consequently, any email platform should integrate nicely with email archiving solutions. Although, as with security solutions, many third party archiving solutions can be used, an email solution provider that includes archiving as part of their optional capabilities will make the transition to archiving much easier. SUPPORT FOR REAL TIME COMMUNICATIONS Instant messaging is an important capability in many organizations because it allows employees and others to know when others are available for a discussion or to answer a quick question. However, most organizations today use consumer-oriented instant messaging clients like AOL Instant Messenger or Yahoo! Messenger, creating a number of security holes: unencrypted content send outside of the organization, port crawling, an ingress point for malware, lack of archiving, etc. Ideally, then, an email platform will include some sort of instant messaging capability that will permit IT to manage the real-time communication that takes place within the organization. This capability should include encryption, archiving, malware scanning and other management controls that will enable employees to take advantage of instant messaging’s benefits while securing the content that is sent and received.

Osterman Research has found that the vast

majority of organizations will not consider a newer,

faster, cheaper or otherwise better email

backend if it requires them to switch desktop clients.



OTHER QUESTIONS Other questions that should be asked of an email solution vendor include: • How many customers does the vendor have and what percentage have a similar

profile to your organization? • What directory capabilities are supported? • How responsive is technical support?

• What logging, monitoring or other reporting services are available that will permit

administrators to understand what is happening in the email infrastructure in at least near real time?

• What external databases are supported for mail stores? • Will an email platform permit you to re-deploy existing server hardware? • What email authentication protocols are supported? • Can the Webmail interface be custom branded?

• What languages are supported?

Summary and Key Takeaways Email has become a utility, it is the information backbone for most organizations, and it is the application that users can least afford not to have operate reliably. The goal of an email solution for any organization, then, is three-fold: • Be as inexpensive as possible.

• Provide the features and functions that users and organizations need today and will

need in the future. • Be as reliable as possible.

There is a mindset among many decision makers that only Exchange, Notes/Domino or GroupWise can meet those requirements. However, there are a variety of alternatives to the “Big Three” that are less expensive to deploy and operate, and that provide all of the functionality that organizations and users require. While using an alternative solution entails leaving the roadmap that a particular vendor might recommend, there are no negative consequences for doing so – if you pick the right vendor.



Sponsors of This White Paper •

Ipswitch Messaging Division delivers crucial communication and collaboration tools without the high acquisition and ongoing administrative costs of systems designed for large enterprises. Millions of people worldwide use Ipswitch Messaging software to communicate via the award winning Ipswitch IMail Server and Ipswitch Instant Messaging. Recognized by PCMag.com as the “best alternative to Exchange” and known for the best customer support in the industry, Ipswitch IMail Server offers comprehensive messaging solutions that deliver all the benefits of extended collaboration.

Ipswitch Messaging offers email archiving and email management solutions that require minimal administrative effort and provide ultimate protection for the small to mid-sized business long-term e-Discovery requirements. Ipswitch archiving solutions are designed to help organizations comply with legislation such as the Sarbanes Oxley act (SOX), Gramm-Leach Bliley act (GLBA) and the Freedom of information act (FOIA). With Ipswitch’s installed solution, email works in conjunction with IMail Server to archive all incoming, outgoing and internal emails. Ipswitch’s hosted application automatically archives messages and attachments to an external storage device where data is stored in a customer-specific environment, but never mixed with any other customer's information. From secure, physical storage to fast, simple retrieval, Ipswitch keeps your data safe, secure and organized. Supported by a world-class team of technical support engineers and customer service representatives, Ipswitch stands ready to apply its development know-how to help make your organization’s archiving and messaging initiatives a total success with secure and affordable solutions.

Mirapoint’s unique appliance model simplifies the task of building and maintaining a Secure Messaging Infrastructure that can meet the new messaging needs of the enterprise. Our appliances deliver bulletproof security and superior performance with five-nines reliability, while dramatically reducing the cost of enterprise messaging. When Mirapoint appliances work together as integrated building blocks of an enterprise-messaging infrastructure, the result is

Ipswitch, Inc. 10 Maguire Road Suite 220 Lexington, MA 02421 www.imailserver.com

Mirapoint Software, Inc. 1215 Bordeaux Drive Sunnyvale, CA 94089 +1 800 937 8118 www.mirapoint.com



even more powerful. They provide a centrally managed messaging infrastructure that can meet today’s needs for security, reliability and compliance, and address new requirements like group collaboration, mobile access and instant messaging. The Mirapoint ComplianceVault, when functioning with the Mirapoint Message Server and RazorGate appliances, passively and discretely copies all messages sent or received within an organization, indexes the messages and places them into a permanent archive. The message archive is backed up securely to tape and then deleted from the originating journal mailbox.

Mirapoint technology is proven, with over 100 million mailboxes served and secured worldwide for customers like Ford, STMicroelectronics, RSA Security, British Telecom, China Telecom, and University of Georgia. © 2010 Osterman Research, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this document may be reproduced in any form by any means, nor may it be distributed without the permission of Osterman Research, Inc., nor may it be resold or distributed by any entity other than Osterman Research, Inc., without prior written authorization of Osterman Research, Inc. Osterman Research, Inc. does not provide legal advice. Nothing in this document constitutes legal advice, nor shall this document or any software product or other offering referenced herein serve as a substitute for the reader’s compliance with any laws (including but not limited to any act, statue, regulation, rule, directive, administrative order, executive order, etc. (collectively, “Laws”)) referenced in this document. If necessary, the reader should consult with competent legal counsel regarding any Laws referenced herein. Osterman Research, Inc. makes no representation or warranty regarding the completeness or accuracy of the information contained in this document. THIS DOCUMENT IS PROVIDED “AS IS” WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND. ALL EXPRESS OR IMPLIED REPRESENTATIONS, CONDITIONS AND WARRANTIES, INCLUDING ANY IMPLIED WARRANTY OF MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE, ARE DISCLAIMED, EXCEPT TO THE EXTENT THAT SUCH DISCLAIMERS ARE DETERMINED TO BE ILLEGAL.

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Why Now is the Time to Consider an Alternative Email Platform