Businesses with less than 1000 staff should consider
replacing in-house e-mail servers with webmail to reduce the
cost of providing e-mail for end users, analyst firm Gartner has
advised.
Matthew Cain, research vice-president at Gartner, said companies
with fewer than 1,000 seats would gain significantly from the
webmail approach.
Geographically dispersed organisations and those that required
less than 99% uptime should also consider the webmail model to
simplify support and improve uptime, he said.
He advised companies undergoing major e-mail transitions to
assess how the webmail approach could deliver better e-mail
economics.
Gartner has predicted that by 2012, webmail will serve the
largest firms, with more than 50,000 seats.
Construction firm
Taylor Woodrow has begun using Google Apps to support
collaboration for 1800 users.
The advantages of webmail for businesses
Webmail services like Hotmail, Yahoo Mail and Gmail have
significantly lowered the costs associated with providing e-mail
for end users.
These free consumer-based services use the
Internet "cloud" to host users' InBoxes, contact address books
and calendars.
They usually provide gigabytes of online storage for InBoxes and
usually allow users to send and receive e-mail via Outlook or
another e-mail client using the POP (post office protocol) or from
a simple web browser user interface
Some
users are now using cloud-based software services including
webmail and
Google Apps, rather than having to install software on their
own desktops.