November 10th, 2009

Social means business

Posted by Rob Koplowitz @ 12:27 pm

Categories: Collaboration, Web 2.0

Tags: Organization, E-mail, Social Networking, Collaboration, Groupware, Strategy, Online Communications, Marketing, Advertising & Promotion, Enterprise Software

October 22nd, 2009

A Forrester interview with Steve Ballmer about the SharePoint Business

Posted by Matthew Brown @ 6:23 am

Categories: Collaboration

Tags: Microsoft SharePoint, Steve Ballmer, Forrester Research Inc., Steve, Content Management, Collaboration, Groupware, Enterprise Software, Software, Phil LeClare

I had the pleasure to sit down with Steve Ballmer for an interview at the Microsoft SharePoint conference in Las Vegas this week. My research team at Forrester spends a lot of time thinking, researching, and writing about the future of information work. So getting Steve’s view on SharePoint’s decade-long evolution from a basic document sharing application to a broad platform for rapid application development, intranet and internet sites, content management, search, social computing, and composite applications, was something I couldn’t pass up.

Unfortunately, pre-taped interviews are like a ball of pizza dough. They start life with different ingredients, get molded into interesting shapes through the discussion, until they’re eventually pounded and rolled out by communications professionals into something utterly flat and lifeless. This is not a ding on Microsoft, Forrester has its share of communications pros with flour on their hands too. For the video version, click here. But let’s consider several highlights that did and didn’t make the video. Consider that Steve:

• Compares SharePoint to the PC… “In my own mind I compare [SharePoint] to the PC, the PC started off life as a spreadsheet machine, then became a programming machine, a word processing machine, [SharePoint is] a general purpose infrastructure that connects people to people and people to information,” says Steve. Is it just me, or does this analogy say a lot about the scale and scope of Microsoft’s ambition for SharePoint? Of course the millions of people licensed on SharePoint today pales in comparison to the billions of people using PCs. But the recipe for SharePoint does resemble the recipe for the modern-day PC to some extent: mix programmability, broadly available developer tools, common user experience conventions (aka, the “ribbon” interface), and useful applications for communicating, reading, writing, and storing information.
• Doubles down on Windows Phone for mobile access to SharePoint… I asked Steve about mobility, specifically whether the SharePoint team is targeting competing smart phones, like RIM’s Blackberry, or Apple iPhone, with dedicated client applications. The answer was “no,” paired with a big Steve Ballmer style smile.  I thought this a fair question as my colleague Ted Schadler’s Workforce Technographics report recently showed that while only 11% of information workers in companies use a smart phone for work, the number of collaborative applications people use on these devices, and the number of locations workers use these apps from are both very high and growing. Combined with decreasing prices for smart phones, it feels like we’re on the brink of a tipping point where smart phones become a ubiquitous platform for enterprise computing. For now, Steve seems willing to let others build iPhone apps for SharePoint. Is this a mistake? Time will tell, but after a week in Vegas of dropped calls and late delivery of SMS messages on my own iPhone, it’d be a big mistake to call the smart phone race prematurely.
• Positions SharePoint as a serious rapid application development platform.  A big focus of the conference, and the interview, was on developers. Steve disagreed with my argument that SharePoint is not a “serious” development platform in the eyes of IT architects and developers. He countered, “I disagree … I think SharePoint is considered a very serious development platform for rapid application development.” What struck me was his take on the opportunity presented by “the many applications companies build with one man year or less of development.” Having worked in or consulted with IT departments for the majority of my career, I can’t tell you how many that is, but I’m confident saying it’s a whole lot. Many of these apps are built on technologies like Microsoft Access, Visual Basic, Lotus Notes, Java server pages, Active Server Pages, and more. So while high-end middleware companies duke it out for the comparatively few large, transactional, and process-heavy apps of the world, Steve appears completely content for now capturing even a portion of the smaller apps market. To get there, Microsoft must convince enterprise architects that tools like InfoPath Forms and SharePoint Designer can be used without taking down entire SharePoint server farms, something Microsoft has ostensibly failed to do thus far. Is SharePoint 2010 the answer? Won’t know til the Beta is underway in November. But given Steve’s talk of creating a SharePoint “sandbox in the cloud,” my bet is we’ll see lots of liberal arts programmers forged into “SharePoint Developers” over the next decade (whether enterprise architects like it or not).

Is the SharePoint/PC analogy a stretch? Is a dedicated SharePoint mobile client for competing devices a missed opportunity for Microsoft? Will SharePoint 2010 finally lead to the next generation of liberal arts “developers” building small, but useful apps? I’ve got my ideas, what about you?

October 16th, 2009

SharePoint rolls on, gathers no MOSS

Posted by Tim Walters @ 9:54 pm

Categories: Collaboration, Content Management

Tags: Microsoft SharePoint, Microsoft Corp., MOSS, Content Management, Collaboration, Groupware, Enterprise Software, Software, Phil LeClare

Next week’s SharePoint conference in Las Vegas is officially sold out, just another sign of the insatiable appetite for Microsoft’s still-imperfect suite. Cold calling sales reps at lesser companies will look on with envy as each attending prospect or customer shells out a list-price $1,199 for the pleasure of hearing a three-day sales pitch about the 2010 version.

And there appears to be plenty to get excited about. Confidential briefings prior to the conference as well as Microsoft’s carefully crafted “sneak peak” teasers have highlighted many cool new features, crisp UI facelifts, and fixes for some major flaws. Already in July, for example, Forrester colleague G. Oliver Young reported on the game changing impact of SharePoint 2010 for the enterprise 2.0 vendors. Of course, the true test will be how well the numerous new and improved features cohere across the suite to drive comprehensive business value. That’s not a question that will be answered in Las Vegas.

What we do know is that Microsoft has applied MOSS-Be-Gone to the product name. Back in April, SharePoint senior director Tom Rizzo announced the demossification of SharePoint 2010. The official reason is that they removed “Office” in order to avoid any confusion with the Office client. Microsoft Office SharePoint Server becomes Microsoft SharePoint Server – oh, but please don’t call it MSS, since that’s already applied to Microsoft Search Server. As Rizzo wrote in April, “Just remember: SharePoint is SharePoint is SharePoint.”

In other words, MOSS had to go in order to emphasize the billion-dollar SharePoint brand. That’s a smart move on Microsoft’s part, but it won’t keep cynics from believing that it was rather because Microsoft wanted to end any association with troubled super models, old-school Formula 1 drivers, or non-vascular plant forms that reproduce via the explosive release of airborne spores. (Although this last might account for the unchecked reproduction of SharePoint sites in the enterprise.)

Microsoft’s product names, at least on the infrastructure side, have always been an arid landscape of dry-as-dust descriptives that produce inelegant initialisms such as WSS, IIS, MSS, and the mercifully sunset but not to be forgotten MSCMS. With Microsoft Office SharePoint Server, Microsoft (accidentally, I suspect) produced an acronym – a word, rather than a string of initials. Alarm bells must have gone off as it became apparent that MOSS is not only pronounceable, it’s a name that erases any obvious reference to both Microsoft and SharePoint. MOSS has something warm and cuddly about it – search for moss on Flickr and you’ll find several cute puppies and kittens – but it’s the antithesis of brand strategy.

So, adieu, MOSS. From a business perspective, Microsoft is doing the right thing by highlighting SharePoint. But it’s sad to let go of a very rare fun name from Microsoft. No one is going to call their pet SharePoint.

What do you think about the passing of MOSS? Please share below – even if it’s only to be the first Microsoft MVP to announce that you’ve just renamed your dog.

October 8th, 2009

The state of US workforce technology adoption

Posted by Ted Schadler @ 7:54 am

Categories: Collaboration, Enterprise mobility, Information Workplace

Tags: Team, Collaboration, Smart Phone, Information Worker, Tool, Workforce, Gen-Y Employee, Recruitment & Selection, Workforce Management, Payroll Solutions

Did you know that among US information workers that:

• 35% use laptops and 76% use desktop computers?
• Only 11% use smartphones?
• 57% are optimistic about technology, but 43% are pessimistic?

We know because we surveyed 2,001 US information workers that use computers in their jobs at firms with 100 or more employees. Here are a few highlights from a report we published today [available to Forrester clients]:

• Most applications are not widely adopted. Email, word processing, Web browsers, and spreadsheets are the top four applications. But even in those apps, the level of involvement or expertise varies widely — while 60% of employees use word processing daily, only 42% actually create documents. Most other applications are used by only a minority of iWorkers.

• There is pent up demand for smartphones. Only one in 10 information workers has a smartphone for work, but one in three agrees that they use a personal mobile phone for work purposes. Twenty-one percent of iWorkers would like to get email outside of work, and 15% would like email on a smartphone. Any way you slice it, this means that there is pent-up demand for smartphones at work.

• Collaboration tools are stalled out, leaving email to reign supreme. Collaboration tools are important for people on a team, particularly if that team is distributed across many locations. But the tools are not widely adopted. For example, only one in four iWorkers uses Web conferencing, and one in five uses team sites. That leaves email with 87% adoption as the default collaboration tool for most people.

• Gen Y employees are getting squashed at work. These younger workers behave very differently from others outside of work, but they are not so different in how they use technology in their jobs. Sixty percent of these 18- to 29-year-olds use social networking at home, but only 13% use it for work — the same percentage as Gen X employees ages 30 to 43.

This data will help Information & Knowledge Management and other IT professionals:

• Improve your negotiating position by using data to drive license discussions. By knowing exactly which applications the workforce is using today and the frequency of use (read: importance) of each application, sourcing and vendor management professionals can bring hard data to the negotiating table.

• Practice lean provisioning, making decisions based on workforce research. By tailoring the workforce technology tool kit to the specific needs of each information worker segment, infrastructure and operations professionals will improve adoption, activity, satisfaction, and productivity. And with tough decisions around desktop virtualization, mobility, and access, quantitative analysis is the right foundation.

• Identify gaps in productivity and barriers to success. CIOs have plenty of scars from the failure of previous technology investments to thrill and delight the workforce. By asking workers what they truly need or why they don’t think they need a new technology, this benchmark will lay the groundwork to prevent future failures.

• Use data to help with tough architecture decisions. “Mobilize every application” is a mantra that rings ever louder in the halls of many IT shops. For an enterprise architect, it’s important to have data to know who’s working at home, who’s working away from his desk, who’s collaborating with customers from a customer site, and what each of those groups needs from technology.

• Talk to business sponsors in the language of metrics. In presenting data on what different groups of information workers need and get from technology, information and knowledge management professionals responsible for a collaboration, portal, or knowledge management program can have a meaningful discussion about adoption, gaps, requirements, and funding.

Questions, comments, thoughts? Please share.

October 1st, 2009

Cisco Buys Tandberg on its way to be your B2B video conferencing partner

Posted by Ted Schadler @ 7:30 am

Categories: Acquisitions, Collaboration

Tags: Video, Cisco Systems Inc., B2B, Tandberg, Business Person, Corporate Communications, Marketing, Phil LeClare

I spent a day with Tandberg management last week and came away very impressed with some things I can’t share and also some things that I can share. Tandberg has:

• Great HD videoconferencing solutions in room-sized all the way down to Webcam. Yep, a Webcam image looks great in a telepresence room. These guys get telepresence and end point integration.
• A management toolkit that works at enterprise scale. It’s an appliance + video network management solution. This is based on the Codian products that Tandberg acquired. They call it “infrastructure” but I think of it as the NOC for video.
• A commitment to video standards. Take note, Cisco: This will be CRITICAL to business adoption of video for partner collaboration.
• A strong focus on interoperability among network protocols, end points, and video codecs. The Codian acquisition clearly gave them some serious engineering. The goal is to keep the old stuff in the mix as firms build on out their new stuff. It looked good in demo, anyway.
• Strong financials, customer base, and growth. This company is well run and winning share in its market. That team will remain in place.

But they were seeing and losing to Cisco in deals. No longer.

Cisco’s going after the biggest driver of network traffic available: Video. (Transporters are still a ways off I’m told by my Vulcan buddies). But to win and be your B2B video conferencing partner, Cisco needs to get big fast and go beyond telepresence to bring in:

• Everybody’s end point: Cisco, HP (yep!), Tandberg, Polycom, Sony, Teliris, LifeSize, RADVISION, Vidyo, etc.
• Desktop video conferencing, the sleeping bear of iWorker demand about to rise in business. This is classic. A business person goes home Skypes his Mom in Mumbai. Why can’t he do it work? Answer me that! I blieve that desktop video conferencing adoption and value will explode once the bandwidth, cameras, and interop tools are in place. But the experience must be improved dramatically over Skype. If Skype is old VC; then Desktop VC must become telepresence quality. I’ve seen it happening. It’s the real deal and demand will take off.
• Interop between carriers and companies. Companies are tired of just VC’ing with themselves. They want to VC with partners. And that requires a big video switch in the carrier hotels. Hmmm, wonder who could pull that one off?

So with a nod towards the dramatic claims in the press releases and a chuckle when considering Cisco’s historical strategy for acquisition with its five precepts (at least two of which have to go out the window with this acquisition), I think this is a good deal for IT professionals.

Now, what to do next:

• First, go back and demand price rationalization from Cisco. Play Tandberg telepresence rooms against Cisco’s and get the best price and service.
• Second, ask your video conferencing service specialist to get on board with this quickly. They will need new skills. Demand that they get them. You need interop.
• Third, demand interop from Cisco. You need it now. Cisco can help you with Tandberg’s gear and interop long before the acquisition closes.
• Fourth and perhaps most important: DEMAND STANDARDS. You need it to protect your investments.

Have thoughts? Please share.

September 24th, 2009

On the record with BlackBerry & iPhone: Both will win

Posted by Ted Schadler @ 11:21 am

Categories: Collaboration, Enterprise mobility

Tags: Apple iPhone, Smart Phone, RIM BlackBerry, Matter, Smart Phones, Cellular Phones, Handhelds, Consumer Electronics, Personal Technology, Hardware

I’m nobody’s fan boy. I don’t love any particular brand. Never have. Never will. It’s not in my DNA. I love my family, I love food and wine and dinner conversation, I love making music with the band, and I love to ride my bike on Metro West roads with a buncha guys. I don’t love products.

But I do love great technology that improves lives and businesses. That’s my calling card and the reason I work at Forrester Research.

We have lots of data and analysis that illuminates the future. It’s our stock in trade. Data like the level of enterprise IT support for bring your own (BYO) phones (46% provide some support). Or the number of working Americans that own a mobile phone (84%) or a smartphone (7.4%). BTW, this data shows where the real growth potential in this market is.

So what matters in the smartphone platform enterprise wars? Great products, stellar service, attractive prices, and memorable marketing matter of course. But in my experience with platforms wars and device wars through the ages, some other things will matter as well:

So who will win? It’s too early to tell, but it looks to me based on these inputs as well as conversations with over 50 enterprise IT professionals that both BlackBerry and iPhone devices will dominate. On the other hand, this market looks a lot more to me like the fast food market than the cola market. It won’t be a two horse race; it will be a 5 or 6 horse race.

But to be clear: My job is to support IT professionals dealing with horizontal workforce technologies. For these clients, I work to identify their needs, issues, and situation. Then I share best practices from other firms and my data-driven analysis of what path they should take. RIM and Apple are at the top of that list today, both in the best practices and in the advice. But I will never count out the other device platforms at this point. Too much investment from too many great vendors to do that.

It’s going to be an exciting market with tremendous advances, hence advantages, for companies and individuals in the next four years. Hang on, folks.

I’m sure other things matter to the enterprise smartphone platform wars, and I’d be happy to hear about them. We’ll learn together.

• BYO phones will matter a lot because it allows firms to deliver the amazing benefits of smartphones to more people at lower cost. And that puts the decision into the hands of an individual (though perhaps from an approved list. [Forrester clients should ping me to see this data; it's an important shift in the market.]
• Applications will matter a lot because people want to do things, not just look cool doing them. True for golfers, true for CEOs, true for everybody. Applications that deliver enterprise value and work well across platforms would be great, but any applicatino that solves a business problem will be attractive to someone.
• Developer passion matters a lot because that’s how great applications get built. One guy I know at an ISV is building a smartphone application in his spare time because he thinks it’s the future.
• Security and device management matters a lot because enterprise IT needs to be able to assure the lawyers that they did everything in their power to protect the company.
• Carrier choice matters because nobody wants to be stuck with a single supplier.
• Individual preference matters because people are more different than the same, and nobody wants to be told what kind of device they have to use. In this, I agree violently with Adam Richardson of FrogDesign. [Couple this with BYO, and you'll see where the real competition lies.]

September 2nd, 2009

Google Chrome browser gets street cred from Sony

Posted by Sheri McLeish @ 11:29 am

Categories: Collaboration

Tags: Sony Corp., Google Inc., Microsoft Internet Explorer, Web Browser, Google Chrome, Web Browsers, Productivity, Internet, Phil LeClare

Today’s news that Sony’s Vaio-brand computers are coming installed with the Google Web browser Chrome for users in the U.S. and Europe provides immediate legitimacy. The computers will also have Microsoft’s IE8 installed, but it makes Sony the first PC maker to sell computers with Chrome pre-installed. This opens the door for Google to rapidly boost consumer market share for its browser and signals that:

• Chrome is really ready for prime time. For Sony to agree to offer Chrome to its new Vaio buyers means that it’s passed muster to meet Sony’s user requirements. Chrome’s been touted for its speed and characteristic Google simplicity, but recent news reports show IE8 outperforming Chrome from a security perspective. In Chrome 2.0, Google added protections against cross-site request forgery and clickjacking that must offer enough improvement to assure Sony that it doesn’t pose a risk its buyers.
• Market share for Microsoft will continue to erode. For years Microsoft’s benefited from having IE pre-installed on new hardware. But as the result of anti-Microsoft backlash, court rulings in Europe, and increasing use of the web, adoption of alternative browsers has been creeping up. Firefox nets nearly 20% of the enterprise browser market and estimates of its adoption by consumers are more than double that. IE has never been more vulnerable, and Google can get a quick boost in market share with this move. Sony doesn’t disclose sales figures, but reports say it expects to sell 6.2 million PCs globally in the next year.
• Consumers will lead but enterprise likely won’t follow soon. While this move gives Google more street credibility with consumers, Forrester doesn’t believe that it signals an exodus from IE as the “official” browser for enterprises. Most organizations are standardized on some version of IE and continue to employ it because of the ease of centralized control and administration. Many are still locked into IE6 because of custom developed apps or third-party apps that only work with that browser version. Until Google invests in providing IT administrators with tools for managing or migrating apps (or perhaps inks a deal with OEMs that offer Chrome on business machines), IE will continue to dominate the enterprise landscape.

For Google, getting Chrome onto more consumers’ computers provides a foundation for its search engine as the default, along with the host of other services it offers, such as Google Docs. In speaking with information workers, consumers, and IT managers, Forrester hears again and again that the decision to go with Google or Microsoft is usually made once, and then the choice for everything else falls out of that decision. With the availability of Chrome alongside IE8 on Sony’s Vaio-brand computers, as well as Windows 7 being shipped in Europe minus IE8, the choice for many consumers becomes much more prominent and rapid.

July 16th, 2009

Microsoft Office 2010: The odyssey continues

Posted by Sheri McLeish @ 10:47 am

Categories: Cloud computing, Collaboration, Content Management, Information Workplace

Tags: Microsoft Corp., Forrester Research Inc., Microsoft Office, Office Suites, Software, Phil LeClare

Sequels never can match the thrill of the original. But the good ones offer a compelling story of their own, develop familiar characters, and introduce something new and exciting. Last week Microsoft gave developers a backstage pass to preview Office 2010, due out in the first half of next year. The drama unfolds with Microsoft and Google waging a multi-front war with each other in search, browsers, productivity tools, and, soon, operating systems. Glimpses of the fourteenth iteration of Office reveal Web-based lightweight apps along with capabilities geared at improving collaboration, multimedia content development, and email management.

Can Office 2010 save the franchise? Or will a simpler, better customer experience from Google draw in a bigger audience before next summer? And what does it mean for the bit players, independents, and sleepers like the Open Office suites from IBM/Lotus, Novell, and Sun, or for Adobe, Zoho, Thinkfree, Corel … that’s a lot of competition for a sluggish software market that Forrester sees as being down by 5% or more for the year.  The glimmer of hope for software vendors will likely come from subscriptions revenue for software-as-a-service (SaaS) products in 2010, which Forrester projects to grow by 7.5%.

Microsoft wants to lead that growing SaaS market. For enterprises, what’s notable about the Office 2010 story is that Office Web apps can be on-premise or hosted. The lightweight Web browser versions of Word, PowerPoint, Excel and OneNote will be free for consumers through Windows Live. Pow! But the bigger deal for enterprises is the option to host Office Web apps on-premises as annuity customers as well as via a hosted subscription through Microsoft Online Services. This option isn’t offered by Google today and, for the moment, may be what makes Office Web apps a hit in the enterprise.

To date, Microsoft’s dominance in large businesses remains mostly intact, with 57% of firms running Office 2007 and 80% supporting some version of Office.  Combined, the alternatives make up less than 8% of the enterprise market, according to Forrester’s March 2009 North America, Europe, And Asia Pacific Desktop Innovation Online Survey. And of those Forrester surveyed, 78% said they have no plans to look for an alternative to Microsoft Office. Real barriers remain for alternatives, from concerns about content control and security, sunk license costs, and online/offline issues for Web-based tools to fear of rejection by business users. Like it, love it, or not, people have a comfortable, familiar relationship with the Office apps. And that’s a critical edge Microsoft must maintain.

Technology Populism is fueling the collaboration and mobile collaboration markets and blurring the lines between work/life boundaries.  The influence of consumer experience can be equally powerful if harnessed by Google for email and productivity. Most enterprise IT departments rely on the feedback of their business users to measure the value of their productivity tools. Forrester data also shows upgrades generally driven by business demands (34%), because current tools are no longer supported (24%), are no longer compatible (16%), or because the culture demands it (15%). By promoting free access to Web-based tools, Microsoft seeks the sway of the public. Office 2000 ends support this month; Microsoft needs to get those firms on board with 2010 somehow. What will your firm do? What are your barriers to upgrading Office or moving to an alternative? Now is a good time to clarify your firm’s strategy, because 2010 looks like it could be a blockbuster year for buyers prepared to negotiate.

July 13th, 2009

Office 2010 Backstage: content + context = collaboration

Posted by Ted Schadler @ 11:36 am

Categories: Collaboration

Tags: Document, Collaboration, Backstage, Advertising & Promotion, Microsoft Office, Marketing, Office Suites, Software, Phil LeClare

Microsoft announced more details on Office 2010 today. It’s a healthy release from my perspective: more, simpler, better, faster, cleaner. But there’s an interesting new thing that Microsoft has introduced with this release. They call it “Backstage,” but it might be easier to think of it as the “context” of the document – everything you need know about it and everything that you can do with it.

At the highest level, Backstage is all the stuff you do once the document has been created: save it, print it, email it, etc. It’s also all of the metadata associated with the document: permissions, version history, etc. This makes it much easier for teams to collaborate on documents and for documents to be part of a workflow or business process.

So why does this matter? Three reasons:

1. The “context” of the document as visible as the contents of the document. It’s as if the book just got a cover, a card catalog label, and an availability tracker. Wow. Metadata that matters to anyone who’s looking for the document.
2. Documents can carry their permissions around with them in a machine-manageable way. This is critical in a world where IT doesn’t always control the devices that information workers use to access documents. For security reasons alone, it’s valuable to have the permissions explicit and attached to the document itself.
3. Backstage is extensible.That means IT shops and third-party developers can build applications that attach context to important documents. For example, a budgeting process goes through approval steps. For the first time, the document itself can carry the status on the book jacket, not at the top of the doc itself. This matters because computers can update the status easily by changing the metadata value.

Clearly, we all need to go learn a lot more about Microsoft’s intentions to utilize Backstage as a core platform element of the Office 2010 system. For example, how will Backstage by harnessed by Sharepoint? But in the meantime, it’s something new to consider as the Office 2010 train pulls out of the station.

Thoughts, comments, concerns? Please comment.

June 22nd, 2009

Calculating the fully loaded costs of corporate email: It's bigger than you think

Posted by Ted Schadler @ 1:09 pm

Categories: Collaboration

Tags: Cost, E-mail, Online Communications, Phil LeClare

Since colleague Chris Voce and I published a pair of reports on corporate email in the cloud (one on the infrastructure and operations and one on the cost of running email on-premises or in the cloud), we have had dozens of discussions with our clients accompanied by detailed cost analyses of the true cost of running email on-premises versus running it in the cloud.

While the cloud-based cost of email is pretty transparent (many providers, including Microsoft and Google, publish their per-user per-month costs), the cost of running email on-premises is often a big mystery to everyone, including most CIOs. The big challenge is that the costs are spread throughout the budget: some in the hardware budget, some in the software budget, some in the storage budget, some in the cost of capital budget, some in the staffing budgets, and so on.

After dozens of these discussions and after a survey of 53 information & knowledge management professionals to ask about the cost of email, it is abundantly clear that few firms know their true cost of running email on-premises. And this matters if you’re considering a move to cloud-based email.

But it an accurate calculation of on-premises email also matters if you are contemplating upgrading your email to a more current version that might support cheaper storage, higher automation, or reduced email database size due to eliminating redundant copies of attachments. You can compare your current costs against the fully loaded costs of the new system with its higher efficiencies.

So we spent four months building and vetting a detailed cost model to help our clients and the industry at large understand how to calculate their cost of running email on-premises. Here’s a clue: It’s more than you think.

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