Press release
STAMFORD, Conn., July 2, 2008 —
Driven by falling prices and new vendors, the percentage of commercial
mailboxes using a cloud-provisioned model will grow from 1 percent of enterprise
seats in 2007 to 20 percent in 2012, according to Gartner Inc. The push into
the cloud e-mail market by large suppliers will cause fundamental restructuring
of the e-mail market, analysts predicted.
"Events during the past year have created the conditions for the rapid
growth of the cloud delivery model for enterprise e-mail, with companies such
as Google, Yahoo, Dell and Microsoft all making major investments in cloud
computing," said Matthew Cain, research vice president at Gartner.
Gartner defines cloud computing as a style of computing where massively
scalable IT-related capabilities are provided "as a service" using
Internet technologies to multiple external customers.
Mr. Cain said that until recently, the cloud computing market has largely been
the domain of small suppliers, but it has been rapidly transformed into a
market where the largest IT companies are aggressively competing. He said that
vendors such as Google, Microsoft and Yahoo have consumer mail platforms that
serve millions of users and that the opportunity and the challenge is to
transfer the economies of consumer mail to enterprises.
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-customized 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 organizations with complex
topologies characterized by geographic diversity and those with less than 99
percent 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 Web site 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 Web site at http://www.gartner.com/it/products/research/cloud_computing/cloud_computing.jsp
