Enterprise Email Wars Heat Up in the Cloud

I recently received a review copy of a useful new Forrester report, Four Giants Compete For Your Cloud Email Business by Ted Schadler, that has a cost breakdown of cloud-based email services from the four leading vendors- Google, Microsoft, IBM and Cisco - and indicates that Google and Microsoft are in the lead for customers. Here is a good overview in Ted’s words from the executive summary.

“Google jumped into the enterprise email market in 2007 with a $50 annual subscription to its cloud email service and turned the market upside down. Microsoft quickly re-evaluated and repriced its Exchange Online offering to $5 per user per month; IBM launched LotusLive Notes and iNotes for $5 and $3, respectively; and Cisco purchased PostPath and opened its WebEx Mail offering with a 5 GB mailbox for $5 per user per month. Each of these big four collaboration vendors has since beefed up and clarified its road map for cloud email and collaboration services. Their email offerings are rapidly approaching feature and price parity — at least on the checklist items.”

Since I became an enterprise of one in 2004, I missed these most recent corporate email wars. My last employer moved from Notes to Outlook but Google had not yet turned the market upside down. Now both Google and Microsoft have bundled in their Web productivity apps, something that IBM and Cisco do not. Cisco allows you to use Outlook.

Over the next five years, Ted writes, enterprises will be re-evaluating their email strategy and partner. For vendors, it will be a tough five years as companies pick a messaging and collaboration partner for the next decade. Ted gives a nice way to estimate your total email costs that appear to be significantly cheaper in the cloud. However, there are migration costs to get there.

Forrester also expects that email will improve it gains features that improve usability and functionality such as: “analytics to perform triage on messages; collaboration features to make it easier to act on a message; in-message widgets to pull information relevant to the message; pushbutton publishing to a team wiki; messages, activities, feeds, tweets, etc., in a single inbox; and so on.”  This is good news and another alignment with the enterprise concept that suggests it is becoming standard. Many of the collaboration platforms already allow you to use them within an email client so this is going in the other direction but likely focused on the tools offered by the email provider. 

Comments

[Pankaj]

Not only does email seem to be the biggest area of growth, but integrated communication and collaboration. This explains the spate of solutions in the past 3 years - Google Apps, Microsoft BPOS, WebEx WebMail, and now VMware pushing Zimbra. At HyperOffice, we have been interested in the integrated communication and collaboration market for many years, but with a focus on small businesses.