Email Archiving, Email Hosting - SaaS

Hey! You! Get off of my cloud...

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LiveOffice has been offering hosted email archiving services since 2001.  As such, we have evolved and grown under the radar, while the media constantly found new names for what we and our brethren do, including:

• Hosting
• Application Service Providers (ASPs - remember those?)
• Software-as-a-Service (SaaS)
• Cloud Computing

While each term truly has its own unique nuances, our business model itself has remained pretty consistent:

• No software or hardware to buy, deploy or manage
• Predictable pricing per user per month
• Securely delivered over the Internet
• Automatically patched and updated

Since cloud computing is the latest label for our industry, we are now going through the predictable hype cycle that all of us have seen many times before:

• Initially: This could be big
  
• Shortly thereafter: This is going to change everything
• Around the same time: Everyone is going to use this
• Upon reflection: Well actually, no one is going to use this
• At the same time (from the other side): No wait, some people will use this and are using this
  
• Much later: Wow, almost everyone is actually using this
  

Think about it.  Remember the articles you read about the Internet in 1995?  The initial predictions were overblown.  Then people said it was dead and a fad during the dotcom crash.  And now look at how it has blown past most of our wildest imaginations.

In the same way, businesses leveraging externally-hosted IT solutions, versus running IT systems themselves (which is what hosting/ASPs/SaaS/cloud computing really is) is going through the same natural evolution.

Consulting firm McKinsey & Co. recently released a report on cloud computing throwing water on the flames of the hype.  One of the key findings, that generated tremendous controversy, was as follows:

Clouds already make sense for many small and medium-size businesses, but technical, operational and financial hurdles will need to be overcome before clouds will be used extensively by large public and private enterprises 

As someone benefiting from the growth in cloud computing, you know what my response is to that?  I agree.  100%. 

It's obvious, isn't it?  Cloud computing is a new area and, by definition, "hurdles" will need to be overcome.  If there were no hurdles, it would not be new.  I'm not sure why that is surprising to anyone.

In fact, I believe in this trend so much that I want the hype to be contained, because the hype obscures the real trends taking place under the covers - namely:

• Small and medium-sized businesses have largely had no good options when it comes to IT infrastructure, given their scale and expertise.  Cloud computing finally levels the playing field.  And although "small" business sounds like a tiny market, it's anything but that.
• At the same time, I am amazed by the number of large companies who, despite knowing all of the hurdles and barriers alluded to above, are still finding cloud-based solutions to be worth the trade off.

So let's get the cloud computing hype over with, because the reality is too promising for us to ignore.