Last week, Gartner analyst, Matthew Cain, released a research report, “Email Is a Commodity and Other Fairy Tales,” that focuses on how organizations need to have a deep understanding of the operational, architectural, policy and feature requirements of an e-mail system to assess whether a cloud provisioning model for e-mail services is right for their organization.
The report found that e-mail is far from a commodity for most organizations as user demands are increasing rapidly, leading to custom deployments that can’t be matched by cloud suppliers. Gartner also found that a well-run, feature-rich e-mail system can add significant value to an organization for reasons that include better uptime, resiliency, security and content control.
Regardless, organizations are faced with complex messaging requirements and as a result, need to realize the importance of having a strong and intelligent email backbone, which is viewed as the middleware of the enterprise message processing infrastructure that sits inside the organization between the Gateway security filtering and Groupware systems. Organizations need an e-mail backbone to mitigate the complexity that can be involved in internal routing requirements and Gartner advises that companies need to have a better understanding of the complex nature of e-mail systems in order to make more informed decisions about e-mail provisioning models.
Gartner agrees that there is indeed an email backbone and email infrastructure market because whether or not enterprises move to the cloud, an email backbone is a necessity in order to manage the new levels of complexity. There are numerous ways an enterprise can benefit if they have a strong e-mail backbone that include added intelligence, improved message processing performance, substantial CAPEX and OPEX cost savings and an architecture that enables hybrid cloud/on-premises messaging infrastructure.