Email Archiving, Email Hosting - SaaS

Cisco Acquires Cloud-Based Web Security Provider ScanSafe for $183 Million

We have a lot of respect for peers of ours in other cloud computing categories.  In particular, ScanSafe has been an innovator in the cloud-based web security space for a long time.

Today, Cisco's security business unit announced they are acquiring ScanSafe for $183 million.

"With the acquisition of ScanSafe, Cisco is executing on our vision to build a borderless network security architecture that combines network and cloud-based services for advanced security enforcement," said Tom Gillis, vice president and general manager of Cisco's Security Technology Business Unit (STBU). "Cisco will provide customers the flexibility to choose the deployment model that best suits their organization and deliver anytime, anywhere protection against Web-based threats."

I've met with Tom Gillis at Cisco before and he's an impressive leader.  Between the amazing success IronPort has had and the new acquisition of ScanSafe, it seems like Cisco is doing well in the cloud security space.

Congrats to Cisco and the ScanSafe team.  Seems like a good fit for both and more validation of cloud computing in general.

Boston Email Blunders Extend Beyond Mayor’s Office

State public records law? What state public records law? Apparently Boston city leaders didn't get the memo ... or at least they didn't let old habits die when improper email deleting practices first came to light.

Last month, I wrote about a key member of Boston Mayor Thomas M. Menino's staff, Chief Policy Adviser Michael J. Kineavy, deleting emails without regard for state public records laws. The issue came to light when the Boston Globe requested copies of Kineavy's emails over a six-month period, which only returned 18 results. This led to the revelation that Kineavy deleted all of his email on a daily basis, without letting them be backed up, in direct violation of Massachusetts public records law.

But the saga continues ...

It turns out that many employees at Boston City Hall were deleting emails regularly - it was a common and seemingly acceptable practice for mailbox management. The problem is state public records law requires the city to preserve "all city email" for two years. Even more surprising, the Boston Globe discovered that a state judge warned Mayor Menino's administration that city employees were deleting email nearly a year ago, but no one did anything to stop it.

Now, Kineavy's computer is undergoing a forensic review, and who knows if city employees are still deleting emails. But I bet Mayor Menino wishes he had a seamless email archiving solution in place right about now.

Email Deflates Balloon Boy Hoax

Once again, email records are at the center of a highly publicized case. This time, they foil a plot for what appears to be fame. Mission accomplished, but I am pretty sure felony charges aren't what the Heenes had in mind.

I realize I may sound like a broken record, but I still find it surprising that people don't know better in this day and age. Even if you put all the ethical and parental lapses of this case aside, who thinks they can put an elaborate plan like this in writing - in email, no less - and not have it come back to bite them? That's a rhetorical question, of course.

But perhaps even more surprising, reports indicate that a "media outlet" may have been involved in the hoax (to what extent, if any, remains to be seen). If this turns out to be true, the plot will definitely thicken - especially if more emails are involved. Let's be clear here: They absolutely should know better. Whether they are a highly respected news organization or in the company of tabloid paparazzi, any organization that has a chance of being involved in litigation within the U.S. Federal Court system must be prepared for legal discovery, according to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP). For most companies, this means an email archiving solution. But one way or another, if this yet unnamed organization was involved, emails will most certainly come into play - and if they aren't able to produce the data in a timely manner and prove that it wasn't tampered with, they will have another issue on their hands.

Only time will tell. But whatever the outcome of this strange case may be in the coming weeks and months, I think it's safe to say that the Heenes' reality show dreams floated away with that balloon ... at least I hope so!

 

 

Cloud wars: IBM enters cloud email price battle

Fans of the Godzilla franchise will attest to the fact that it's fun to watch giants at battle.

 

Last week, IBM introduced LotusLive iNotes, its cloud-based email offering in response to Google Apps and Microsoft Online Services.

As LiveOffice is a long-time provider of cloud-based email archiving services, we are excited about the increasing choice for customers in cloud email.

IBM has chosen to enter the market at a low price point ($36 per user per year, versus $50 for Google) but provides fairly limited mailbox sizes (1 GB) in its first iteration.

With rumors of Cisco entering the market, the battle is certainly going to be exciting to watch.

Matt Cain from analyst firm Gartner Group put it well in a recent interview with CRN.com:

"It's going to be a battle to the death," said Cain. "It's going to be great because the customer wins.  

Let the wagers begin as to who ends up as Godzilla and who becomes Mothra.

Groundhog Day: Email is dead again... not!

One of my favorite movies of all time is Bill Murray's masterpiece, Groundhog Day.  In the movie, Bill is stuck in a small town in my native Pennsylvania, where he wakes up each day to repeat the day before.

Every year, I read the same article and I feel like I'm stuck in that movie.  You know that article.  The one with the brilliant insight that we get too much email and that we can't keep up.  And that some (IM, SMS, facebook, twitter, Google Wave) new technology will repeat it.

Well here's the latest Groundhog Day sighting from the Wall Street Journal:

Email has had a good run as king of communications. But its reign is over.

In its place, a new generation of services is starting to take hold-services like Twitter and Facebook and countless others vying for a piece of the new world. And just as email did more than a decade ago, this shift promises to profoundly rewrite the way we communicate-in ways we can only begin to imagine.

You can read my thoughts at my last post on this topic, after the last article with exactly the same theme, about a year ago.  These articles seem to pop up once a year, as predictably as Punxsutawney Phil finds his shadow.

Admittedly, since I run a cloud-based email archiving provider, I'm highly biased.

However, many others agree with me.  As analyst Michael Osterman put it in his response, the reason these email death sentences are ridiculous is that the new communication media tend to be complements to, not replacements of, email:

Further, it's important to understand that email is not really competitive with instant messaging, Twitter, Facebook or other tools -- for the most part, these tools are complementary. For example, if it's 3:00am and I need to send a file to someone, I will have little expectation that the recipient will be available via IM, and I can't send them a file on Twitter, but I can send them an email knowing they'll receive it in the morning. If it's 10:00am and I need a quick answer to a question, I can IM someone whose presence status I can see. If I want to follow the comments and news pointers from people whose opinion I consider valuable I will use Twitter. If I need to collaborate on a project via a shared workspace, I will use any of the growing number of tools built for that purpose.

Similarly, blogger Email Tide points out that the beauty of email is that it keeps evolving:

In reality, email is still evolving to better handle the vast amounts and types of information that it was never intended for. New social networking services, instant messaging, voice, video, presence, wikis, blogs, bookmarking, media sharing and micro blogging will eventually all come together and complement each other, and email will definitely be part of the mix. Solutions such as Xobni or Baydin are leading the way to a more useful and better-integrated mailbox. 

So email isn't dead and probably won't be for quite a while.  However, that doesn't mean we'll stop talking about it.

Prime Time: Exchange 2010 takes the field

Quick post but we're excited to see Microsoft has released Exchange 2010 to manufacturing.  They are targeting November 9th for General Availability.

Microsoft is claiming 10 million mailboxes already hosted on Exchange 2010 via its Live@Edu educational hosting program.

As we announced back on September 1, 2009, we officially support email archiving of Microsoft Exchange 2010 today.  Indeed, as we discuss in the previous post, we think there is a great value proposition for using archiving ahead of a move to Exchange 2010 to reduce migration time, cost and risk.

Beyond the buzzword: SaaS wanna-bes

With apologies to Ginger, Scary, Baby, Posh and Sporty of the Spice Girls, if you "really really want" a software-as-a-service solution for email archiving, you often have to search through many wanna-bes.

One of the most common techniques for half-SaaSing one's way into cloud is for on-premise vendors to take license software and attempt to host it themselves or through partners.  

Phil Wainewright at ZDNet refers to this as SoSaaS, or "Same old Software, as a Service."

The excellent analysts at Haut Tech put this as #1 in their spot-on list of "Ten Ways to Fail as a SaaS Company":

Your licensed product is very unlikely to be a good candidate for a SaaS product. This is a "test" of something you can never sell, maintain, operate or scale to reach a decent market. So - what are you testing? This is what is known as SoSaaS. Vendors of licensed products, especially high-value, line of business applications, typically aim their product at the top of their vertical market. It's just more cost efficient for sales and marketing. The product is loaded with features that satisfy that end of the market and tuned for skilled install by client IT personnel. If it penetrates the 100 top accounts - it's golden. SaaS products are built to sell and scale to a much wider market. If you can't do that you are very unlikely to recover your hosting and maintenance costs - much less further development costs in a SaaS model. 

Having lived in both the on-premise and SaaS worlds, I fundamentally believe the business models and product development strategies are different.  SaaS vendors can't force fit their way into the on-premise world and software vendors can't magically become service providers.

SaaS for email archiving requires product simplicity, usability and scalability often not found in on-premise solutions.  In addition, on-premise vendors typically don't have the in-house experience in network operations, service level management and billing that is required for the second "S" in SaaS. 

So if your on-premise software vendor tells you they have a new SaaS "delivery model" or "hosting capability," I'd take the Spice Girls' advice:

Now don't go wasting my precious time
Get your act together we could be just fine 

Showing On-Prem Email the Door

Once in awhile, a blog post rolls around that is so profound, you can't help but blog about it. Eric Knorr - you rock. The excerpt from your entry that follows below is simply poetic -

It's time for e-mail to go. Out of the datacenter, pronto. Get the hand trucks, hold the door, and roll those mail servers outta here. Email is a storage hog, a time-suck to manage, a compliance liability, and about the least strategic thing imaginable. It's one of the few "services" that seems absolutely perfect for the cloud: a commodity with a well-known, pedestrian set of expectations. Please, let somebody else handle it.

And, then there's this ...

I just want e-mail to be isolated as an enterprise-class cloud service, with all the modern archiving and anti-spam and compliance features you could ask for and a massively scalable underlying server infrastructure IT never has to worry about. Why is that so hard? Yes, I know some companies can't outsource messaging for compliance reasons. But for everyone else, the time has come to show e-mail the door.

This all sounds familiar ... we hear the same thing from many of our clients each day. They are done managing email and archiving on-premise. If there's one service they're willing to move into the cloud - it's email - and understandably so.

On a related note, we're excited to see IBM throwing their hat into the cloud email ring with the intro of their new Lotus Live iNotes offering. Dear Lotus Notes -- Welcome to the cloud! There's plenty of room and the view is good. -- Sincerely, Your Friends at LiveOffice

SaaS Revenues: The New Darlings of Software

Ray Wang, a partner at Altimeter Group, compiled revenues for some of the larger on-premise and cloud-based providers and discovered an interesting trend. In yet another tribute to Neil Patrick Harris, wait for it... SaaS vendors are seeing year-over-year revenue gains and on-premise vendors, on average... aren't.

 

Wang's analysis:

"Continued economic pressures force customers to choose best of breed and purpose built solutions.  SaaS vendors appear to be the beneficiary as the overall business model aligns with client pain points."

This mirrors what we here at LiveOffice have been seeing within the industry as well. The cloud gives organizations the opportunity to implement solutions that remedy some of their most vital business needs (such as email archiving), at a price that won't have the CFO bawling while keeled over the books. This is all part of a compelling story that will seemingly keep the cloud sky high for years to come. We're just happy to be a part of it.