Gartner: Email wird Cloud Computing zum Durchbruch verhelfen

Gartner believes the biggest expenses for the providers of cloud-provisioned consumer mail are currently electricity and storage and that the biggest cost for enterprise e-mail operations during the next 10 years will be level-one help desk support as reduced licensing and operational costs improve enterprise cloud-based e-mail economics.

Gartner predicts that the uptake of cloud e-mail will start with small companies (the only area where it is successful now) and move to midsize companies, and by 2012, the cloud model will serve the largest firms, with more than 50,000 seats.

"As large suppliers push into the cloud e-mail market we'll see a fundamental restructuring of the e-mail market," said Mr Cain. "Traditional e-mail software-as-a-service (SaaS) vendors will come under tremendous price pressure from mega-scale vendors. Established traditional dedicated server model hosting vendors will fare better based on their ability to offer larger-scale and more-customised e-mail."

From an end-user point of view, Mr Cain said that companies with fewer than 1,000 seats typically have had the highest costs associated with e-mail and would stand to gain significantly from the cloud approach. He also advised companies undergoing major e-mail transitions to examine the cloud model to deliver better e-mail economics. Finally he said organisations with complex topologies characterised by geographic diversity and those with less than 99 per cent uptime should consider the cloud model to simplify support and improve uptime.

Additional information is available in the Gartner report "E-Mail and the Cloud." The report is available on Gartner's website at http://www.gartner.com/DisplayDocument?ref=g_search&id=688123&subref=simplesearch.

This document is part of the special report on cloud computing. A full listing of the reports is available on Gartner's website at http://www.gartner.com/it/products/research/cloud_computing/cloud_computing.jsp.

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