The Wave Is Dead; Long Live Email
I’ll admit it. I love bad horror movies. Give me zombies, vampires, fake blood and some popcorn and I’m all set. Whether it’s quality (28 Days Later) or quantity (Halloween 300 is coming out soon I think), I just can’t say no to the Jasons of the world.
One common theme of horror movies is the idea that the bad guy never really dies, no matter how many times he gets run over, shot, stabbed or blown up.
With that long-winded introduction, I kind of feel the same way about email. While it’s not responsible for terrorizing tourists (actually I guess BlackBerries do frighten many vacationing families) or infecting the world with a deadly virus (I take that back too), email has proven to be resilient.
As I’ve pointed out before, every few years, some breathless reporter opines about how some new technology means the end of email. The reporter usually thinks he or she is the first one in the world to point out that they get too much email. And usually [new technology X] is the solution.
The latest faux silver bullet for email was the much-hyped Google Wave.
And while being an amazing engineering feat, Google Wave suffered the same defeat as all other pretenders challenging email. Google announced last week that it is canceling Google Wave, due to the small problem of “user adoption.” It was awesome but not useful. Email may not be awesome, but it’s darn useful.
The truth is that for all its warts (too much email, spam, reply-to-all, bcc, etc.), email’s universality and simplicity mean it’s here to stay. I know I’m biased because I run a cloud-based email archiving company, but that doesn’t make it any less true. Email has withstood the test of IM, SMS, social media and now Wave and is still going strong.
To paraphrase TechCrunch (writing about the iPhone), email is the “email killer killer.”
My money’s on email outliving Freddie Kruger. What do you think?
LiveOffice Reports Record Second Quarter Revenue
Thanks to the trust our clients place in us, we were fortunate to have another record revenue quarter at LiveOffice. In this world of uncertainty and “double dips,” it’s nice to feel like we’re a part of an industry (cloud-based email archiving) that is on the rise.
We’ve been very focused on reaching our new clients through our partners, many of whom integrate our cloud-based archiving service with other cloud-based services that they sell. As a result of some of the product investments we made to make it easy for our partners to provision and support our joint customers on their own, our partners drove more than 60% of our new business in Q2 2010.
And we are lucky to be working with some great companies. We were named partner of the year by Intermedia, the world’s largest Hosted Exchange provider. In addition, over 100 Microsoft Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS) customers (companies using Microsoft for cloud email) implemented our cloud archiving solution. Finally, we continue to have great traction providing archiving for customers using Cisco WebEx Mail, Cisco’s cloud-based email solution.
Archiving is also definitely going mainstream and moving beyond compliance, with our Personal Archive solution (which gives our customers’ users unlimited, searchable mailboxes) growing at an annual rate of 177 percent.
My marketing folks say I have to link to our press release, so here it is 
Freedom of Choice … It’s a Beautiful Thing!
Have you ever moved only to discover that your current service providers don't serve your new neighborhood? (I have - more than once - and it's an extremely frustrating experience!) Instead of simply taking your services with you, you are forced to start from scratch, often foregoing features you once enjoyed, losing history with a provider, experiencing higher costs, etc. But you have no choice. It's all or nothing.
What I love about our recently announced archiving support for cloud email is the freedom of choice it offers our clients and potential clients. We don't believe in locking you into a solution without any flexibility if your circumstances change. As the old adage goes, change is constant.
But one thing is certain: if you archive your email with LiveOffice, it will still be there, safe and sound, if you need to switch email service providers or decide to move your email to the cloud, as many companies are doing in this day and age. Not only do we support on-premise solutions (Microsoft Exchange, IBM Lotus Notes and Sendmail), but we are also the first email archiving provider to support all the major cloud-based email providers, including Microsoft Exchange Online, Cisco WebEx Mail, Google Apps and Intermedia. And if, for whatever reason, you need to move your email archive in house, we support that, too.
Ah, a collective sigh of relief ...
Free Your Archive to Work With Cloud-Based Email
When you think about all-time great quotes in movie history, this one from Braveheart certainly has to be in the conversation:
Aye, fight and you may die. Run, and you'll live... at least a while. And dying in your beds, many years from now, would you be willin' to trade ALL the days, from this day to that, for one chance, just one chance, to come back here and tell our enemies that they may take our lives, but they'll never take... OUR FREEDOM!
While William Wallace's cause was a lot more important, we at LiveOffice also believe in freedom.
In the spirit, we announced yesterday that we're the first independent email archiving solution to support email archiving and email continuity for all major on-premise and cloud-based email systems. Now our customers have freedom to move their email wherever they want, knowing that their archive will continue to work. You can read coverage of our announcement at eWeek, ZDNet and SearchStorage.
If you follow the messaging world, you've probably seen the huge amount of activity and interest in cloud email recently, including:
- Gartner Group predicting the percentage of business mailboxes that are hosted soaring from 1% to 20% by 2012.
- Microsoft predicting that 50% of Exchange mailboxes will be cloud-based in the next five years.
- Google winning the huge project to modernize email for the City of Los Angeles.
- Microsoft dropping pricing for its Exchange Online service to $60/user/year, making it very competitive with Google's $50/user/year price point.
- Cisco announcing its new cloud-based, Microsoft Outlook-compatible Cisco WebEx Mail service.
- Microsoft releasing the long-awaited Exchange 2010
- Independent provider Intermedia becoming the first cloud provider to offer hosted Microsoft Exchange 2010.
And that was all in the last few weeks!
As I speak with customers in my travels, the interest in cloud-based email is off the charts, as customers look to benefit from the economics, scale and focus of providers like the ones above.
At the same time, clients have a number of concerns including:
- Legal/Compliance: How do I ensure retention, discovery and compliance best practices if my email is in the cloud.
- Reliability: What if my provider goes down? What if they lose my data?
- Lock-In: What if I don't like my provider and want to switch? What if I want to bring it in-house?
We see archiving as a great way to address all three of these concerns:
- Freedom: With a cloud-based archive that supports cloud-based email systems, you are free to address your legal/compliance issues no matter where your email resides.
- Backup: A cloud-based archive, properly setup, can also act as an insurance policy for cloud-based email. It becomes a backup of all of your email data, so your eggs aren't all in one basket. In addition, some cloud-based archives offer email continuity, allowing you to send and receive from the archive if the email provider is down or unavailable.
- Portability: Since the cloud-based archive has a second copy of your data, you are now able to switch email providers with ease, knowing you control your data. You now have leverage over your provider.
In this spirit, we announced that we were the first email archiving provider to support all major cloud-based email platforms, including:
- 123Together
- AppRiver
- Apptix
- Azaleos
- Cisco WebEx Mail
- Google Apps (Premier)
- groupSPARK
- Intermedia
- Microsoft Exchange Online
- PanTerra Networks
- USA.NET
- Yahoo! Zimbra
- Other POP/IMAP-based solutions
- Personal Email Accounts (e.g., Gmail, Yahoo! Mail, Windows Live Hotmail)
You can learn more here or by watching our snappy video on the functionality.
Also please join us for our webinar, tomorrow, Thursday, November 12, 2009 @ 10:30 AM PT where Brian Babineau from analyst firm Enterprise Strategy Group and I will discuss the trend toward cloud-based email and its impact on archiving.
We'll have a ton more to share in the coming days about the details of our integrations, some of the benefits customers are already seeing and where we go from here.
Now I'm going to call Mel Gibson to see if he wants to be our spokesperson...
Gartner: Cloudy days ahead for on-premise email tools
As organizations move their email systems into the cloud, to systems like Hosted Microsoft Exchange 2007, what does that mean for the various add-on tools used in the email environment (e.g., email security, email backup, etc.)?
Gartner recently published a report forecasting tough times ahead for on-premise email tools:
The analyst house has suggested that expected pace of adoption of e-mail software as a service platforms threatens the livelihood of the vast e-mail third-party vendor community.
Hardest hit will be applications which help protect, secure and stabilise e-mail systems, it has said.
Gartner has described how vendors currently providing some of the premises-based systems that are not necessary for SaaS implementations could be impacted by the shift in favour of software services.
We're excited to help clients in this transition, enabling them to start with cloud-based email archiving and email disaster recovery and then moving them to cloud-based email itself.