Email to lead charge into cloud computing

Matthew Cain, Gartner research vice president, says that the push into the cloud e-mail market by large suppliers will cause fundamental restructuring of the email market. “Events during the past year have created the conditions for the rapid growth of the cloud delivery model for enterprise email, with companies such as Google, Yahoo, Dell and Microsoft, all making major investments in cloud computing.” Cain suggests that, until recently, the cloud computing market has largely been the domain of small suppliers, but that it has been rapidly transformed into a market where the largest IT companies are now competing aggressively. He insists 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, while the biggest cost for enterprise email operations during the next 10 years will be help desk support as reduced licensing and operational costs improve enterprise cloud-based email economics. “As large suppliers push into the cloud email market, we’ll see a fundamental restructuring,” says Cain. “Traditional email 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 email.”