Intermedia commissioned a new white paper from industry research firm Osterman Research in order to provide additional tools to the marketplace regarding hosted Exchange. The below is part of a series of excerpts from the white paper, “The Case for Hosted Exchange” – available on Intermedia’s web site. Click here to read previous excerpt from “The Case for Hosted Exchange”. 

Benefits for IT

WHAT BENEFITS CAN YOU EXPECT?

Why should your organization consider migrating to hosted Exchange? There are a number of important reasons to consider doing so that are focused on direct costs, opportunity costs, security and other benefits, as discussed below.

LOWER COSTS

Many decision makers believe that an internally managed Exchange deployment is less expensive to deploy and operate than hosted Exchange. While in some cases that perception is accurate, very often it is not. Osterman Research’s cost models have demonstrated that an on- premise, 100-seat Exchange deployment costs nearly $40 per seat per month over a three-year system lifetime, while a 1,000-seat deployment costs just over $24 per seat per months. Given that hosted Exchange offerings are priced substantially less than this? The direct cost savings from using hosted Exchange are substantial. It is also important to note that leading providers of hosted Exchange include the licensing costs as part of their service, further reducing the cost of hosted compared to on-premise Exchange.

MORE PREDICTABLE COSTS

Further, a hosted Exchange deployment provides more predictable costs than on-premise deployments because the cost per seat is fixed over the lifetime of the contract with the hosting provider. This predictability of costs manifests itself in two important ways:

• Unforeseen problems can create additional costs for an on-premise deployment, including natural disasters, power outages, moves to new facilities and other events that can add to the cost of managing on-premise Exchange in a somewhat unpredictable manner.
• An organization that continually adds users will at some point, reach the maximum number of users that its infrastructure will support and will then have to add servers and other infrastructure to support new users. This creates a step function in the total cost of ownership for an Exchange environment can delve up the cost of Exchange management dramatically.

REDUCED OPPORTUNITY COSTS

Among the more important issues that any organization should consider is that of the opportunity cost of IT staff members or, in smaller organizations, individuals who are charged with maintaining on-premise systems. Most decision makers understand that finding and retaining qualified IT staff is not particularly easy. As a result, in-house IT staff members should be used in a manner that allows them to provide maximum benefit to their employer, while also giving them a satisfying work experience that will motivate them not to go elsewhere. Using hosted Exchange frees IT staff members from the requirement to constantly monitor the servers to ensure continuous uptime, freeing them for work that is not only more interesting to them, but also more compelling for the business.

With hosted Exchange, IT staff can be deployed on projects that offer more competitive value to the organization and can also result in greater IT job satisfaction. For example, if an IT staff member can manage a massaging capability very well he or she provides some level of value to the organization. However, lf the same staff member spent ‘the same amount of time implementing new CRM capabilities that could convert a higher proportion of prospects into customers, it is very likely that much greater value could be realized from the same level of effort.

ACCESS TO EXCHANGE EXPERTISE

Although Exchange is an easy system for users to employ, it is not a simple system to manage internally. It requires expertise in a number of areas, particulars? When deploying a new version of the system, it requires expertise in each of the several server roles that comprise the Exchange platform, and it requires expertise in various other technologies that are integral to the Exchange ecosystem. The cost to develop this expertise can be high and, for smaller organizations, often prohibitive. In contrast, the use of a hosted Exchange provider can offer access to well-trained technical support staff that are available on a 24×7 basis that can typically resolve problems quickly and with minimum expertise from their customers.

The service aspect of hosted Exchange should not be overlooked when considering a provider of the service. Because few companies operate on an 8-to-5, Monday through Friday schedule, it is just as critical to have access to Exchange expertise at 11:00pm on a Saturday night as It is during normal business hours. This allows users to have their issues resolved in a timely manner without the cost and burden of maintaining in-house staff to manage a help desk, etc. In short, a specialist will virtually always offer better service and support when resolving Exchange- related problems.

ROBUST BUSINESS CONTINUITY AND DATA BACKUP

One of the more compelling benefits of hosted Exchange is the fact that a third party is managing the entire backend infrastructure, thereby minimizing the impact of major and minor services outages and the ensuing loss of email that can impede any business. For example, a hurricane or tornado can knock on-premise systems out for days or even weeks while less serious problems like power outages or storms can bring down massaging capabilities for hours or even a few days. While these events can also impact providers of hosted Exchange services, leading providers will back up their customers’ email, allowing uninterrupted receipt of email for customers until they can come back online. This is something that a non-technical staff member or senior executive can do.

Further, in the event that a customer’s facilities are made unavailable for any length of time, employees can still access their hosted Exchange accounts from anywhere using a Web browser a mobile device or a copy of Outlook or Entourage on their home computer.

RAPID DEPLOYMENT AND SCALING

One of the chief benefits of hosted Exchange is the speed with which email services can be deployed. For example, deploying hosted Exchange apically requires little more than the modification of an MX record and possibly a change in the configuration of local email clients. Adding new users to an existing hosted Exchange deployment normally requires just some simple modifications in a Web-based administration tool. This makes it easy to add or eliminate small numbers of users or even entire business operations, which   is particularly important when integrating merged or acquired companies into an Exchange infrastructure.

DEPLOYMENT FLEXIBILITY

A hosted Exchange capability allows organizations to be more flexible in the way that they deploy email to their employees. For example, a company may opt to manage Exchange in- house for its corporate headquarters, but provide hosted Exchange to each of its field offices that do not have an in-house IT staff. This allows the organization to provide highly available messaging services that provide a consistent user experience across the entire organization, but at much lower cost than if the IT staff was used to manage the satellite offices.

RELATIVELY PAINLESS MIGRATION TO NEW EXCHANGE VERSIONS

Migrating from one version of Exchange to another is just that – a migration, not an upgrade. Because Exchange does not allow an in-place upgrade to a new version, the cost of migration can be very high and even prohibitive for smaller organizations. Using a hosted Exchange provider, on the other hand, minimizes or even eliminates the cost of migration, since some providers will migrate their customers to a new version at no charge, Not only does this minimize the IT pain and the time required to migrate, not to mention the potential for downtime in the system, but it also dramatically reduces the overall cost of Exchange management over the long term.

MINIMIZING THE IMPACT ON THE INTERNAL NETWORK

Another important benefit of hosted Exchange is that much of the network traffic that would normally take place with an on-premise deployment of Exchange is transferred to the hosting provider. For example, a hosted Exchange provider that also offers anti-virus and anti-spam filtering will eliminate 75% or more of the email that would normally come into the network as scam, only to be quarantined and eventually discarded by end users. This saves significantly on both bandwidth and storage, costs that are growing exponentially and unpredictably in smaller organizations.

ROBUST PHYSICAL SECURITY

Virtually all leading hosted Exchange providers operate very secure physical facilities that include video surveillance capabilities, multiple employee access points using multi-factor authentication, tracking and monitoring tools and other capabilities that protect their customers’ data from being compromised. In most cases the security provided by hosted Exchange providers exceeds the security that their customers could afford to deploy.

Measures, such as SAS 70 audits or WebTrust certification, can provide an extra level of assurance for customers. SAS 70 Type II, for example, is a set of professional auditing standards that assesses the internal controls that a provider uses, as well as the auditor’s opinion on the effectiveness of these controls.

THE ABILITY TO FOCUS ON CORE BUSINESS PROCESSES

The use of hosted Exchange allows an organization to focus more on its core business processes rather than devoting resources to managing its Exchange infrastructure. While many IT decision makers believe that managing massaging capabilities is part of their core competency that is really not the case in most organizations. Letting a hosted Exchange provider manage key messaging capabilities is most often a better use of IT staff members’ time, as discussed above.

THE ABILITY TO DEPLOY A HYBRID SOLUTION

Many organizations will want to maintain at least some part of their Exchange infrastructure In- house. The use of a hosted Exchange provider allows this sort of hybrid solution. For example a corporate headquarters with thousands of users could have Exchange deployed in-house, while remote offices that do not have dedicated IT staff or specialized Exchange expertise could use a hosted solution. This permits all users in the company to have the same experience with Outlook or Entourage and with their mobile devices, while at the same time driving down the cost and complexity of managing Exchange, Another variant of the hybrid approach can be to offer hosted Exchange for some users and a less feature-rich email offering for other users whose needs are not as sophisticated. For example, an organization could deploy hosted Exchange for office workers while deploying an email-only, non-Exchange solution for workers behind retail counter or on a factory floor.

You can download white paper “The Case for Hosted Exchange” from our site.

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Intermedia commissioned a new white paper from industry research firm Osterman Research in order to provide additional tools to the marketplace regarding hosted Exchange. The below is part of a series of excerpts from the white paper, “The Case for Hosted Exchange” – available on Intermedia’s web site. Click here to read the first excerpt from “The Case for Hosted Exchange”. 

What is Hosted Exchange

Microsoft Exchange Server is the leading business-grade messaging system employed in North America and is currently used by 160 million people worldwide. Exchange offers a number of capabilities, including email, calendaring, task management, address lists, and access to shared document repositories, and other functions. Exchange was originally introduced in June 1996 and has been upgraded several times since to include additional and enhanced features. The current version is Exchange 2007, although Exchange 2010 was released in November 2009.

ENTER HOSTED EXCHANGE

Hosted Exchange has been offered for several years by a large and growing number of providers around the world. There are roughly 150 providers of hosted Exchange services worldwide, although these vendors vary widely in terms of their capabilities, the number of users they support, the ancillary services they provide, their pricing, etc. As of late 2009, there are roughly 10 million users of hosted Exchange worldwide, up from just 1.5 million seats in mid-2007.

WHO IS THE IDEAL CANDIDATE FOR HOSTED EXCHANGE

There is a perception that hosted Exchange is intended only for small businesses, while on-premise Exchange is better suited to mid-size and large organizations. While this has been the conventional wisdom for some time, and while smaller organizations can realize the most significant per-seat savings from the use of hosted Exchange, larger organizations are realizing the benefits of migrating to a hosted Exchange model. For example, GlaxoSmithKline announced in March 2009 that it is migrating 100,000 users to hosted Exchange.

You can download white paper “The Case for Hosted Exchange” from our site.

Click here to read the next excerpt from “The Case for Hosted Exchange”.

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Intermedia commissioned a new white paper from industry research firm Osterman Research in order to provide additional tools to the marketplace regarding unified communications. The below is part of a series of excerpts from the white paper, “The Benefits of Unified Communications for SMBs” – available on Intermedia’s web site. Click here to read previous excerpt from “The Benefits of Unified Communications for SMBs”.

The Benefits of Unified Communications

IT BENEFITS

Unified communications typically results in long term cost savings for any organization because both email and telephony – the two most important communications tools – can be managed as a single entity, and because hardware and software costs are typically reduced. This leads to greater efficiencies in the use of IT staff time and lower labor costs, not to mention substantially hardware and software costs. However, an added benefit is that some portion of IT staff time is freed for other tasks or initiatives that can provide greater value to a company. However, using a hosted model for unified communications can yield even greater benefits, particularly for smaller organizations. Because hosted services are generally less expensive than deploying and managing on-premise systems, a hosted unified communications system can result in significant cost savings. The cost savings will typically be greater a) the smaller the organization is and b) the more geographically distributed it is.

END USER AND BUSINESS BENEFITS

Why does unified communications offer a better experience for end users and IT alike? There are several benefits that employees and employers alike can realize:

• For end users, having access to all of their communications tools – email, calendars, telephony, real time communications and corporate directory – in a single interface offers a major productivity boost. Instead of having separate interfaces for checking email, making appointments, placing telephone calls, or having instant messaging conversations, all of this can take place in one interface.
• The use of one interface for all communications allow employees greater flexibility in where they work. For example, using a unified communication system an employee can be just as productive at home or in a hotel room as he or she is in the office. That means that teleworking is easier, leading to improved employee morale and greater employer flexibility in hiring employees independently of their geographic location.
• Unified communications can also improve the speed of decision making, since an employee sitting in an airport or at home can receive calls or conduct instant messaging conversations just as if he or she was at their desk. This eliminates much of the “telephone” tag that takes place in business today.
• For those organizations focused on “green” initiatives, unified communications can support these initiatives in several ways, including reducing the number of individual systems and power requirements that a company must support, reducing employee travel into the office by allowing them to work remotely more often, and minimizing the amount of floor space in an office by allowing employees to use the “hoteling” concept – i.e., coming into an office location only when necessary.

1 Gartner, Inc. “Dataquest Insight: Teleworking, The Quiet Revolution (2007 Update)” by Caroline Jones, May 14, 2007

You can download white paper “The Benefits of Unified Communications for SMBs” from our site

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Intermedia makes Exchange 2010 available to channel, adds new partners

Philbert Shih

Intermedia has extended the hosted Exchange 2010 service to its reseller channel. With Intermedia early to the market with 2010, its resellers will get a nice head start on the competition, enabling them to capture customers that have been waiting for Exchange 2010 and are either ready to adopt hosted Exchange now that the new version is out or make the upgrade. With another iteration of Exchange on the market, Intermedia is set to capitalize on a wider market opportunity.

Intermedia’s reach into the market includes a disclosed 4,000 reseller partners ranging from newest partner Ingram Micro to much smaller IT shops, service providers and hosters. The company recently secured partners in the emerging Latin American market, adding Columbia’s Solosoft, a systems integrator, and Venezuela’s Soto Networks, a managed services provider. Soto Networks signed on a 1,000-seat account shortly after becoming a partner.

Intermedia’s Exchange 2010 business comes with a data protection guarantee powered by its own proprietary technology, DataEcho. With DataEcho, customer data is replicated in real time within the datacenter that the customer is hosted in, while also being replicated over the network to another datacenter in a separate geographical location (Intermedia has four datacenters across California and New York). With the data protection, Intermedia is able to deliver disaster recovery services to customers and make for a nice marketing angle that can and should be monetized.

Intermedia continues to push forward in the hosted Exchange market, which has been under pressure through this recession as businesses cut back employees and freeze hiring with the implications this has for mailboxes. However, the hosted Exchange (and hosted email) sector as a whole has performed admirably as organizations continue to see the logic in moving on-premise Exchange servers into third-party datacenters. It makes too much sense from a cost, performance and efficiency perspective, while allowing customers to easily and affordably consume value-added services like archiving, security and disaster recovery. These facts have helped offset customer churn created by the economic environment and kept growth moving in a positive direction.

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Interesting articles in the news today:

Channel Insider — What IT Leaders are Whispering in Budget Meetings: IT organizations slimmed down their spending in 2009, but are looking to make some strategic IT investments in 2010. What characterizes these investments is that they will provide some cost-cutting or other value to the overall business, according to a new survey conducted by the Economist Intelligence Unit and commissioned by Accenture. Here’s an inside look at what’s going on inside IT organization budget meetings as IT leaders look ahead to next year’s strategic initiatives…

Redmond Channel Partner — Partner Hosting Still Has a Future: Long the subject of benign neglect, the Services Provider License Agreement has been rejuvenated in the last year with significant program changes.

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With the launch of hosted Microsoft Exchange 2010,  Intermedia commissioned two white papers from industry research firms in order to provide additional tools to the marketplace regarding Exchange 2010 and in particular, hosted Exchange 2010. The below is the third in a series of excerpts from the white paper, “Why You Should Consider Migrating to Hosted Exchange 2010” by Osterman Research, Inc. – available on Intermedia’s web site.  

Not all hosted Exchange providers are created equal.  There are often important distinctions between even leading vendors, and so decision makers should evaluate providers based on their specific requirements.  Here are some of the key issues to consider when evaluating providers of hosted Exchange services.

MULTIPLE DATA CENTERS

Does the provider operate multiple data centers?  If so, are these data centers served by multiple, Tier 1 Internet providers?  These are important considerations for disaster recovery purposes, but they can also permit greater levels of uptime compared to a provider that operates only one data center or that does not use highly available Internet providers.

Further, the use of multiple data centers allows the use of a data center that is geographically closer to users and so can provide better messaging system performance.  Related to this is the ability to specify which data center serves which mailboxes, something that not all hosted Exchange providers offer.

THE PROVIDER’S TRACK RECORD

The provider’s track record is another important consideration.  How long have they been in operation?  What are their long-term uptime numbers?  What is their past and current financial performance?  How many customers do they have?  All of these questions should be answered satisfactorily.

THE PROVIDER’S LONG-TERM ROADMAP

A provider’s long-term roadmap of planned feature and function enhancements is also an important consideration in choosing a provider.  When will they migrate to the newest version of Exchange?  Do they offer hosted SharePoint or OCS?  Do they offer hosted archiving?  What other services, features and functions are on their long-term roadmap?  How consistent have they been in deploying new services, features and functions in years past?

THE COST AND PAIN OF MIGRATING TO A NEW PROVIDER

Another important consideration in choosing a provider of hosted Exchange 2010 is the tools and services they offer to help in the migration of data, either from another hosted Exchange provider or from an on-premises deployment of Exchange.  This is an important issue, since the migration can be time-consuming and somewhat onerous if the wrong provider is chosen.

THE PROVIDER’S SUPPORT CAPABILITIES

It is also important to understand the specific support capabilities that a hosted provider offers.  For example, how long will the provider’s support organization take to respond to an inquiry during business hours?  After-hours on weekdays?  At 3:00am on a Saturday night?  Further, what other support capabilities does the provider offer for tech support staff and end users?

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This week, Gartner predicted that worldwide SaaS revenues would grow by 18 percent in 2009. From our perspective, this aggressive prediction – totally at odds with the generally gloomy economic picture – is quite right. Salesforce, the SaaS industry bellwether, continues to grow revenues above 20%, and Microsoft is experiencing very rapid SaaS growth, albeit from a lower base.

Here at Intermedia we are also growing faster than this, but our partners are far exceeding the 18% figure. Exchange and related services revenues for our private label Exchange hosting partners are growing in the region of 65 % per year – and this should only increase further with the recent launch of hosted Exchange 2010.

Gartner does break out different segments of SaaS. Intermedia would fall under the ‘content, communications and collaboration’ group (try saying that 10 times, quickly!), which is predicted to grow around 20% in 2009. Outsourcing business email and unified communications is a logical step for many companies, and often a ‘first taste’ of how well it can work to outsource critical systems to specialist companies.

It seems then that SMBs – which we serve here at Intermedia – are adopting SaaS more rapidly than the market at large. Still, the 18% growth rate for SaaS across the board is still impressive, especially in light of Gartner’s prediction of a 5.2% decline for IT spending as a whole in 2009.

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With this week’s launch of hosted Microsoft Exchange 2010,  Intermedia commissioned two white papers from industry research firms in order to provide additional tools to the marketplace regarding Exchange 2010 and in particular, hosted Exchange 2010. The below is the second in a series of excerpts from the white paper, “Why You Should Consider Migrating to Hosted Exchange 2010” by Osterman Research, Inc. – available on Intermedia’s web site.  

REDUCED PER-SEAT COSTS, ESPECIALLY FOR SMALLER ORGANIZATIONS

Although there are many reasons that organizations should consider the use of hosted Exchange, perhaps the most important reason is its ability to significantly reduce the cost of overall Exchange management.  This has traditionally be a chief argument used in attempting to convince very small organizations of the need for hosted Exchange given that the smaller the organization, the higher their per-seat costs for Exchange and other messaging functionality.

However, the ability to cut the cost of Exchange management through hosting is by no means limited simply to small organizations.  Much larger organizations – those with hundreds and even thousands of users – can also realize significant cost savings by migrating to hosted Exchange and away from an on-premises Exchange environment.  While the cost differences may be most pronounced for the smallest of organizations, even large organizations can see significant reductions in their total cost of managing Exchange by moving to a hosted model for some or all of their users.

MORE PREDICTABLE INVESTMENTS

Closely related to the overall cost savings available in a hosted Exchange model is the more predictable nature of costs with hosted Exchange.  Because virtually all hosted providers commit to a fixed cost per seat over the life of an annual or multi-year contract, decision makers can know what the cost of Exchange management will be over the life of the contract.  On-premises deployments, on the other, hand, can sometimes necessitate new servers or appliances as a result of rapid increases in the volume of spam or the addition of new users.

MORE EFFICIENT USE OF IT STAFF MEMBERS

A hosted Exchange model can also make best use of scarce IT staff members, allowing them to be used for projects or initiatives that can provide more value to an organization.  For example, despite the mission-critical nature of messaging, using seasoned IT staff members to manage Exchange servers, apply patches and the like may not be the best of their time or talent.  Instead, using these staff members for initiatives that can provide a differentiation for a company – such as using them to deploy customer-facing technologies to shorten tech support wait times – might be the better choice.

HIGHER LEVELS OF UPTIME

Osterman Research has found that many organizations do not achieve the 99.9% uptime that most hosted Exchange providers guarantee as part of their Service Level Agreement.  Hosted Exchange providers can offer a very high level of uptime, usually exceeding that of most on-premises deployments.

BETTER SECURITY AGAINST SPAM AND MALWARE

Leading hosted Exchange providers typically offer very robust security capabilities through the use of multiple malware- and spam-filtering technologies, carrier-grade firewalls and other security measures that often would be cost-prohibitive for their customers to deploy and support.  The result of using a hosted Exchange provider is typically (but not always) a higher spam and malware capture rate, lower false positives, and a reduced possibility of malware infiltration.

DATA PROTECTION

Another important benefit of using hosted Exchange is that leading providers will back up their customers’ data and provide rapid data recovery in the event of a server outage or other unforeseen problem.  Further, hosted Exchange can provide protection against natural disasters, fires, power outages, floods and other disrupting events that can knock on-premises email systems out for days or weeks.  This is particularly true for hosted Exchange providers that operate multiple data centers and replicate customer data to at least two geographically distributed data centers.

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With yesterday’s launch of hosted Microsoft Exchange 2010,  Intermedia commissioned two white papers from industry research firms in order to provide additional tools to the marketplace regarding Exchange 2010 and in particular, hosted Exchange 2010. The below is the first in a series of excerpts from the white paper, “Why You Should Consider Migrating to Hosted Exchange 2010” by Osterman Research, Inc. – available on Intermedia’s web site.  

WHO SHOULD CONSIDER MIGRATING TO EXCHANGE 2010

Any organization that uses Exchange should seriously consider migrating to the newest version of the system.  There are a number of reasons to do so, including the ability to significantly lower the cost of ownership, a wider range of storage options that can be used in the new system and thereby driving costs lower, better archiving to enable improved regulatory and legal compliance, and a better user experience that can make individual users more efficient.  Plus, as noted above, organizations that may want to one day migrate to unified communications will have a solid foundation available on which to build their unified communications capabilities.

Further, organizations of all sizes should consider deploying Exchange 2010 as a hosted service.  Doing so, particularly for those organizations that have up to 500 users, can significantly reduce the total cost of ownership for Exchange, provide more predictable costs, improve the effectiveness of IT staff members, improve uptime for end users, provide better protection against spam and malware, and improve the overall resiliency of the system.  It is also important to consider using a hosted Exchange provider that can provide necessary capabilities and that has a solid roadmap for deploying future services.

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With the Microsoft Exchange 2010 release coming soon, Intermedia commissioned two white papers from industry research firms in order to provide additional tools to the marketplace regarding Exchange 2010 and in particular, hosted Exchange 2010. The below is the second in a series of excerpts from the white paper, “An Overview of Microsoft Exchange Server 2010” by The Radicati Group, Inc. – available on Intermedia’s web site.  

Why Businesses Should Consider Upgrading to Microsoft Exchange 2010

Businesses should have few concerns about upgrading to Microsoft Exchange 2010. Microsoft Exchange 2010 is a top-of-the-line messaging and collaboration suite that features new and cutting-edge technology. In particular, businesses should consider upgrading to Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 for the following reasons:

• Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 enhances the experience of business users on the go, offering them multiple ways of accessing their inbox, from any web browser using Microsoft Outlook Web Access (OWA), or mobile device using Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync (EAS) or Microsoft Outlook Voice Access (OVA).
• Archiving and retention introduced in Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 gives IT administrators greater control over historical email records, necessary for compliance with government rules and regulations.
• For the first time, Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 was developed with built-in hosted capabilities, allowing service providers to offer a reliable Microsoft Hosted Exchange service to subscribers. Also, enhanced high availability and disaster recovery features minimize of unplanned downtime, ensuring that businesses will have continual access to their email accounts.

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