Why Now is the Time to Consider an Alternative Email Platform

Why Now is the Time to Consider
an Alternative Email System
by

An Osterman Research White Paper
Published March 2010

SPONSORED BY
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Osterman Research, Inc. • P.O. Box 1058 • Black Diamond, Washington 98010-1058
Tel: +1 253 630 5839 • Fax: +1 253 458 0934 • info@ostermanresearch.com • www.ostermanresearch.com
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Why Now is the Time to Consider an Alternative Email Platform

Why You Should Read This White Paper
Email is pervasive, used by virtually every business and by the vast majority of
individuals who have any interface with a computer. Consider that:

• Email is the primary communications system in most organizations, viewed by users
to be more important than the telephone, instant messaging and fax.

• Users spend more than one-quarter of their day doing something in their email
client.

• Nearly three-quarters of the content that users communicate is sent through email.

• It is the primary method for sending files and has become the single largest
repository of business records in most organizations.

• Email is one of the most expensive applications that IT manages. For example, an
organization of 1,000 users will pay in excess of $24 per seat per month for email, or
nearly $300,000 per year; smaller organizations pay even higher costs per seat.

In short, email has become something of a utility
like electricity – an absolutely essential tool that Osterman Research found
users and organizations cannot live without, yet that 42% of decision
an expensive capability that offers few makers indicated that they
differentiating advantages even for companies would likely or definitely
that manage it well. make the switch to an
alternative vendor, while
Most organizations today use Microsoft another 34% were open to
Exchange, IBM Lotus Notes/Domino or Novell the idea of migrating.
GroupWise for their email, calendaring and other
requirements. While these platforms provide
very good performance and are provided by solid vendors, they often are more
expensive to deploy and manage than many “alternative” platforms, such as those
discussed in this white paper. However, companies that have migrated to a leading
alternative email platform have given up nothing in terms of functionality – these
systems offer robust email, calendaring, contact management, task management and
other capabilities, all while preserving the integrity of the user experience and
dramatically lowering the cost of email.

THERE IS DEMAND FOR ALTERNATIVES
The goal then, is to deploy an email system that is highly reliable, meets current and
future needs, and can be managed as inexpensively as possible. While most
organizations are not using alternative email platforms, many are open to doing so. For
example, in a survey that Osterman Research conducted in November and December
2009, we asked “if you could replace your backend messaging infrastructure with one
that provided significantly better performance, server loading, lower costs or other
significant advantages, but that allowed you to keep your current desktop clients, how
likely would you be to switch”? We found that 42% of decision makers indicated that

©2010 Osterman Research, Inc. 1


they would likely or definitely make the switch to an alternative vendor, while another
34% were open to the idea of migrating.

The bottom line is clear: organizations need email, they need to spend less on it, and
they are open to ways of doing that.

ABOUT THIS WHITE PAPER
This white paper discusses the high costs of managing email and the benefits that
organizations can realize if they migrate to an alternative vendor. The paper also briefly
discusses the offerings from two leading alternative vendors, Ipswitch and Mirapoint.

The Benefits and Problems of Email
EMAIL IS STILL THE BACKBONE OF COMMUNICATIONS
Email is vital to the individuals who use it and the organizations that deploy it for their
employees. Consider the following:

• In the business email market, there are roughly 160 million users or licensees of
Microsoft Exchange, 125 million users of IBM Lotus Notes/Domino and 30 million
users of Novell GroupWise. Add to that the tens of millions of users of business
email served by Google, Gordano, Ipswitch, Kerio, Messaging Architects, Mirapoint,
VMware and many, many other vendors.

• An Osterman Research survey conducted in September 20091 found that 81% of
email users regularly check their work-related email from home on weekdays, 78%
do on weekends and 60% while on vacation.

• The survey also found that despite the growth of alternative communication tools
like Twitter and Facebook, 45% report that over the past six to twelve months their
use of email is increasing.

• A May 2009 Osterman Research survey2 found that 97% of email users consider
email to be important or extremely important in doing their work. By contrast, only
86% of users felt this strongly about the telephone, while 45% felt this strongly
about instant messaging capabilities.

EMAIL IS WHERE USERS SPEND THEIR DAY
Email is the most commonly used application used by corporate employees; consider the
following from an Osterman Research study:

• Email users spend an average of 152 minutes on a typical day working in their email
client, or 28% of their nine hour, nine minute workday. Compare this with their use
of the Web at 138 minutes per day (23%), attending in-person meetings (13%) and
talking on the phone (12%).

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• Further, email users spend only 13% of their time on a typical day not working on a
computing platform of some kind, whether it’s a desktop computer, laptop computer,
smartphone, etc.

• Slightly more than one-half of email users report that more than a quarter of the
information they need to do their work can be found somewhere in their email
system.

EMAIL IS EXPENSIVE
Despite the fact that email is so widely deployed and offered by a large number of
vendors, leading solutions tend to be quite expensive to deploy and manage. For
example, Osterman Research estimates that Exchange and Notes/Domino, the most
widely deployed email platforms in North America, cost more than $24 per seat per
month to deploy and manage over a three-year lifecycle. While both platforms offer
very good functionality and are provided by leading vendors with a long track record of
innovation and solid performance, these solutions are relatively expensive to deploy and
manage.

To demonstrate the costs of operating an email system for organizations of various
sizes, Osterman Research has built a cost model for Exchange and presented the results
in the table below.

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There are two key takeaways from this table:

• Not surprisingly, the cost of email goes down dramatically as more users are added
to the system.

• Even in a large organization of 1,000 users, email is still quite expensive.

Why Consider an Alternative Email Solution?
Why should any organization consider an alternative to the email system they currently
have installed, such as Exchange? There are a variety of reasons to consider a different
vendor.

YOU CAN GET THE SAME OR BETTER FUNCTIONALITY
A corporate email platform needs to do several things, including the ability to send and
receive email, maintain individual and group calendars, provide contact management
and task management capabilities, encrypt outbound content, archive content, maintain
robust defenses against spam and malware, and allow users to access these capabilities
via a thick client (most often Microsoft Outlook) and a Web browser. While leading
systems like Exchange perform these functions
very well, many other platforms also provide all
of these capabilities. Because many alternative
email systems require
For example, Ipswitch IMail Server and Mirapoint significantly less
Message Server, the email platforms offered by administrator
the two sponsors of this report, Ipswitch and involvement, the labor
Mirapoint, respectively, provide all of the cost associated with
functions discussed above, including support for managing email can be
Outlook or your favorite desktop client. This significantly reduced with
means that the user email experience will remain
an alternative email
virtually unchanged – a critical consideration as
platform.
discussed above – but the IT experience will be
significantly enhanced, as discussed below.

YOU CAN REDUCE YOUR COSTS AND INCREASE FLEXIBILITY
Another important benefit (arguably the most important benefit) provided by the use of
an alternative email platform is a much lower cost of ownership on a number of levels:

• Lower labor costs
Labor costs represent anywhere from 58% to 88% of the three-year total cost of
ownership for an email system as shown in the table above. Because many
alternative email systems require significantly less administrator involvement, the
labor cost associated with managing email can be significantly reduced with an
alternative email platform.

• Lower licensing costs
The licensing costs for servers are typically lower with alternatives, as well. While



the license cost for an email server distributed over a large user base over a three-
year period may represent a relatively low cost per user on a monthly, licensing
costs are a substantial up-front investment that can typically be reduced when using
alternative email platforms.

• More flexibility in the backend infrastructure
Some alternative email platforms provide a wider variety of operating system and
hardware options on which the email server software can be deployed, resulting in
reduced costs for the backend infrastructure.

• More flexibility for users
While most users opt to use Outlook as their client of choice for email, alternative
platforms typically support both Outlook and a variety of Web browsers. To be fair,
Microsoft Outlook Web Access (OWA) can also be accessed using a number of
different browsers, but the full functionality of OWA is available only when using
Microsoft Internet Explorer.

YOU WON’T RISK ANYTHING LEAVING THE “ROADMAP”
One of the key concerns that many decision makers express when considering an
alternative email platform is that they will leave the “roadmap” of the vendor they are
currently using, effectively cutting them off from the features and functions that will be
provided in future versions of the platform they are using. However, decision makers
concerned about leaving the roadmap of a market-leading vendor should consider the
following:

• Leading email platform vendors continually develop their solutions and offer
enhanced functionality over time – but so do vendors of alternative email platforms.
The decision, then, is not to stay with Vendor A’s roadmap or abandon future
enhancements to email, but instead deciding if Vendor A or Vendor B has the better
long term roadmap (along with the lower costs and greater flexibility that can be
realized today).

• When considering any vendor’s roadmap, it is important to consider all of the
ramifications that might be involved. For example, Exchange 2007 offered a number
of important and useful features. However, it also required migration to 64-bit
hardware that was not common at the time. The result was a significant
improvement in email performance, coupled with a requirement to make major
investments in new hardware and an inability to repurpose existing, 32-bit server
hardware.

Similarly, Exchange 2010 now includes native email archiving, an important and
useful new capability in Exchange. However, the archiving functionality in Exchange
2010 requires use of Outlook 2010, deployment of which will take years to
implement in some companies.

• Many large organizations are using alternative email systems, including NASA,
Mitsubishi Motors, the Boston Public School system, ITT Tech, the US Department of
Homeland Security, Volkswagen, the US Department of the Navy, the Boston Celtics,



the North Orange County Community College District, Toro, Harvard Medical School
and the University of Georgia, among many others. Use of an alternative email
vendor does not mean that you’re blazing a trail where others have not gone.

The bottom line is that switching to an alternative email platform offered by a vendor
with a solid track record of innovation does not carry with it any more risk than staying
with a leading vendor.

What You Should Look For in an Alternative Platform
Any email platform, whether it’s the one you’re currently using or an alternative that you
might be considering, should meet all of your current, anticipated and even
unanticipated requirements in the context of total cost of ownership, performance,
features, functions and abilities to help you comply with the growing variety of legal and
regulatory requirements you face. Here are some important things to consider when
evaluating alternative email platforms (and your current solution).

ROBUST AND SCALABLE MESSAGING BACKEND
Any email platform should support a reasonable number of mailboxes per server. While
there are no hard and fast rules about the minimum number of mailboxes that a server
should support, a higher server loading will result
in fewer physical servers or appliances that are
required to operate an email infrastructure. Many large organizations
Reducing the number of servers typically will are using alternative email
result in significantly lower IT labor costs, since systems, including NASA,
there will simply be less infrastructure that Mitsubishi Motors, the
administrators must deploy, configure, patch, Boston Public School
restore, etc. Reducing the number of physical system, ITT Tech, the US
servers can also result in significant power Department of Homeland
reductions, potentially saving thousands of Security, Volkswagen, the
dollars per year in power costs.
US Department of the
Navy, the Boston Celtics,
There are a number of questions that should also
be asked when considering any email vendor: the North Orange County
Community College
• How much unplanned downtime does the District, Toro, Harvard
server experience? Medical School and the
University of Georgia.
• How much planned downtime is required for
maintenance, patch management, etc.?

• What is the sustained and peak throughput of the platform?

• How scalable is the system overall and per server?

• Can the server run on any of several different operating systems, or is a specific
operating system required?



• If you’re evaluating an email appliance, what operating system does it use?

• Can your email servers run in a virtualized environment? If so, which one(s)?

ROBUST AND INTEGRATED SECURITY CAPABILITIES
Any email infrastructure must protect users from the growing onslaught of spam,
malware, phishing attempts and other increasingly nasty stuff that enters through email.
It must also protect the organization from sensitive content that leaves the organization
through email. Key questions to ask of an email platform vendor include:

• What inbound security tools are provided as part of the email platform offering?
What outbound tools are provided?

• Are reputation services available to provide protection at the edge of the network, or
does all spam and malware processing take place at the email server?

• What are the spam and malware capture and false positive rates?

• Are these tools homegrown or provided by third parties?

• Can users access their own quarantined emails and do administrators have the
option of turning this capability on or off for certain users?

Of course, you can use any hosted, appliance-based or server-based security tools you’d
like with any email server you choose. However, if the email platform vendor offers
robust and reliable capabilities as part of their offering, this can speed the deployment
of the system you choose and drive down the total cost of ownership.

SUPPORT FOR MOBILE MESSAGING
The growing use of smartphones means that users in organizations of all sizes will rely
on their mobile devices as a primary way of accessing corporate email. This requires an
email solution to interface seamlessly with mobile platforms and protocols, most often
BlackBerry Enterprise Server and ActiveSync. While BlackBerry support is important
given that BlackBerry is the dominant mobile platform in use today, ActiveSync support
is becoming increasingly important to support not only Windows Mobile devices, but also
the iPhone.

ABILITY TO ENCRYPT CONTENT
Email messages and files that are not encrypted are sent in clear text or some other
easily readable form, which allows them to be intercepted – either with malicious intent
or accidentally – when, for example, an email or file is sent to the wrong person. This is
akin to writing and mailing a postcard with the contents exposed to everyone handling
the card during its journey to the recipient. Hackers and others with malicious intent
can intercept email messages and read them simply by placing packet sniffers on the
network. Any email platform, therefore, must allow content to be encrypted easily and
with a minimum of intervention.



SUPPORT FOR MICROSOFT OUTLOOK
A critical consideration for any email solution is its ability to support the de facto
standard client, Microsoft Outlook. Osterman Research has found that the vast majority
of organizations will not consider a newer, faster, cheaper or otherwise better email
backend if it requires them to switch desktop clients. Because that client is Outlook in
more than 60% of organizations, any email platform must permit the use of Outlook,
preferably without a plug-in.

AN “OUTLOOK-LIKE” EXPERIENCE IN A BROWSER
Similarly, an email platform should offer a Webmail client that is least similar to OWA,
the de facto standard for Webmail in corporate environments. While Outlook itself
should be supported as noted above, the much lower use of OWA compared to Outlook
means that vendors of an email solution will meet the bulk of demand by providing a
Webmail experience that merely mimics OWA. The advantage of an OWA-like
experience – as opposed to OWA itself – is that it gives users and organizations more
flexibility in their choice of Web browser.

SUPPORT FOR EMAIL ARCHIVING
Email archiving has become a necessity for a Osterman Research has
variety of reasons: to satisfy regulatory found that the vast
compliance obligations that require retention of majority of organizations
business records stored in email, to meet legal will not consider a newer,
obligations to retain emails in support of e- faster, cheaper or
discovery and other litigation-related activities, to otherwise better email
improve the performance of email servers by backend if it requires them
reducing the amount of “live” content they to switch desktop clients.
maintain, and to provide a repository of content
for data mining purposes, among other reasons.

Consequently, any email platform should integrate nicely with email archiving solutions.
Although, as with security solutions, many third party archiving solutions can be used,
an email solution provider that includes archiving as part of their optional capabilities will
make the transition to archiving much easier.

SUPPORT FOR REAL TIME COMMUNICATIONS
Instant messaging is an important capability in many organizations because it allows
employees and others to know when others are available for a discussion or to answer a
quick question. However, most organizations today use consumer-oriented instant
messaging clients like AOL Instant Messenger or Yahoo! Messenger, creating a number
of security holes: unencrypted content send outside of the organization, port crawling,
an ingress point for malware, lack of archiving, etc.

Ideally, then, an email platform will include some sort of instant messaging capability
that will permit IT to manage the real-time communication that takes place within the
organization. This capability should include encryption, archiving, malware scanning and
other management controls that will enable employees to take advantage of instant
messaging’s benefits while securing the content that is sent and received.



OTHER QUESTIONS
Other questions that should be asked of an email solution vendor include:

• How many customers does the vendor have and what percentage have a similar
profile to your organization?

• What directory capabilities are supported?

• How responsive is technical support?

• What logging, monitoring or other reporting services are available that will permit
administrators to understand what is happening in the email infrastructure in at least
near real time?

• What external databases are supported for mail stores?

• Will an email platform permit you to re-deploy existing server hardware?

• What email authentication protocols are supported?

• Can the Webmail interface be custom branded?

• What languages are supported?

Summary and Key Takeaways
Email has become a utility, it is the information backbone for most organizations, and it
is the application that users can least afford not to have operate reliably. The goal of an
email solution for any organization, then, is three-fold:

• Be as inexpensive as possible.

• Provide the features and functions that users and organizations need today and will
need in the future.

• Be as reliable as possible.

There is a mindset among many decision makers that only Exchange, Notes/Domino or
GroupWise can meet those requirements. However, there are a variety of alternatives
to the “Big Three” that are less expensive to deploy and operate, and that provide all of
the functionality that organizations and users require. While using an alternative
solution entails leaving the roadmap that a particular vendor might recommend, there
are no negative consequences for doing so – if you pick the right vendor.



Sponsors of This White Paper
•
Ipswitch Messaging Division delivers crucial
communication and collaboration tools without the
high acquisition and ongoing administrative costs of
systems designed for large enterprises. Millions of
Ipswitch, Inc. people worldwide use Ipswitch Messaging software to
10 Maguire Road communicate via the award winning Ipswitch IMail
Suite 220 Server and Ipswitch Instant Messaging. Recognized
Lexington, MA 02421 by PCMag.com as the “best alternative to Exchange”
www.imailserver.com and known for the best customer support in the
industry, Ipswitch IMail Server offers comprehensive
messaging solutions that deliver all the benefits of
extended collaboration.

Ipswitch Messaging offers email archiving and email management solutions that require
minimal administrative effort and provide ultimate protection for the small to mid-sized
business long-term e-Discovery requirements. Ipswitch archiving solutions are designed
to help organizations comply with legislation such as the Sarbanes Oxley act (SOX),
Gramm-Leach Bliley act (GLBA) and the Freedom of information act (FOIA). With
Ipswitch’s installed solution, email works in conjunction with IMail Server to archive all
incoming, outgoing and internal emails. Ipswitch’s hosted application automatically
archives messages and attachments to an external storage device where data is stored
in a customer-specific environment, but never mixed with any other customer's
information. From secure, physical storage to fast, simple retrieval, Ipswitch keeps your
data safe, secure and organized.

Supported by a world-class team of technical support engineers and customer service
representatives, Ipswitch stands ready to apply its development know-how to help make
your organization’s archiving and messaging initiatives a total success with secure and
affordable solutions.

Mirapoint’s unique appliance model simplifies the
task of building and maintaining a Secure
Messaging Infrastructure that can meet the new
messaging needs of the enterprise. Our appliances
Mirapoint Software, Inc. deliver bulletproof security and superior
1215 Bordeaux Drive performance with five-nines reliability, while
Sunnyvale, CA 94089 dramatically reducing the cost of enterprise
+1 800 937 8118 messaging. When Mirapoint appliances work
www.mirapoint.com together as integrated building blocks of an
enterprise-messaging infrastructure, the result is



even more powerful. They provide a centrally managed messaging infrastructure that
can meet today’s needs for security, reliability and compliance, and address new
requirements like group collaboration, mobile access and instant messaging.

The Mirapoint ComplianceVault, when functioning with the Mirapoint Message Server
and RazorGate appliances, passively and discretely copies all messages sent or received
within an organization, indexes the messages and places them into a permanent
archive. The message archive is backed up securely to tape and then deleted from the
originating journal mailbox.

Mirapoint technology is proven, with over 100 million mailboxes served and secured
worldwide for customers like Ford, STMicroelectronics, RSA Security, British Telecom,
China Telecom, and University of Georgia.

© 2010 Osterman Research, Inc. All rights reserved.

No part of this document may be reproduced in any form by any means, nor may it be distributed without the permission
of Osterman Research, Inc., nor may it be resold or distributed by any entity other than Osterman Research, Inc., without
prior written authorization of Osterman Research, Inc.

Osterman Research, Inc. does not provide legal advice. Nothing in this document constitutes legal advice, nor shall this
document or any software product or other offering referenced herein serve as a substitute for the reader’s compliance
with any laws (including but not limited to any act, statue, regulation, rule, directive, administrative order, executive
order, etc. (collectively, “Laws”)) referenced in this document. If necessary, the reader should consult with competent
legal counsel regarding any Laws referenced herein. Osterman Research, Inc. makes no representation or warranty
regarding the completeness or accuracy of the information contained in this document.

THIS DOCUMENT IS PROVIDED “AS IS” WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND. ALL EXPRESS OR IMPLIED
REPRESENTATIONS, CONDITIONS AND WARRANTIES, INCLUDING ANY IMPLIED WARRANTY OF MERCHANTABILITY OR
FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE, ARE DISCLAIMED, EXCEPT TO THE EXTENT THAT SUCH DISCLAIMERS ARE
DETERMINED TO BE ILLEGAL.


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