Free Your Archive to Work With Cloud-Based Email
By: Nick Mehta | Posted: 2009-11-11When 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...
“Freemium” as a way to try SaaS
By: Nick Mehta | Posted: 2009-03-11Phil Wainewright from ZDNet has, hands-down, the best blog on software-as-a-service (SaaS) out there.
As usual, he has a new and very insightful post today - this time on "freemium" business models.
Freemium, for those of you that don't know, is the idea that was first popularized in consumer services, where you allow a customer to use a free service and then enable them to upgrade to a paid service:
At the heart of a ‘freemium' business model is a notion that makes me viscerally uncomfortable: giving something away for nothing. Services are given away free in the expectation of being able to sell paid-for, premium services to a subset of customers later on. In essence, the free subscriptions are a marketing cost that is recouped once the premium services start to take off. Fair enough, but in the heady atmosphere of recent years, some people have driven this model to extremes. Twitter and Facebook are examples of what I would call the ‘lunatic fringe' of the freemium business model: enterprises that give away services without any preconception of how they'll eventually recoup the cost of acquiring and servicing those free subscriptions. From a business perspective, this surely is unadulterated folly.
Phil then goes to highlight several companies offering free business services as lead-ins to a paid service. Box.net is a personal favorite. I know the company well and am an avid user of the service.
We actually launched our own freemium offering last fall with LiveOffice Mail Continuity. In this service, we offer a completely free email disaster recovery service that allows users to view, send and receive email directly from Microsoft Outlook in the event that their internal Microsoft Exchange server is unavailable.
As I discussed previously, we launched this free service for two reasons:
- We think this is a great way for customers to pilot email "in the cloud" with minimal impact on their production email system. Indeed, we offer a free trial to test the free service.
- Once a customer is setup for this service (which involves a simple configuration change in Microsoft Exchange and provides an integrated folder in Microsoft Outlook), there is literally no additional setup to move the customer to our paid email archiving service. So the customer simply has to sign a contract and agree to pay us, and we then retain the data based upon the customer's retention periods.
So for us, our freemium allows us to help potential clients, let them learn about us and give them an easy path to move to our paid service.
A bailout plan for your Exchange server: Free email continuity
By: Nick Mehta | Posted: 2008-09-29Quick quiz. What goes up and down in wild swings, often with no explanation? If you answered the stock market, you're right. But if you guessed that your internal Exchange server is also prone to volatility, you are correct there as well.
In this spirit, we are announcing LiveOffice Mail Continuity, a completely free "bailout plan" for your internal mail server.
Why Mail Continuity
When we talk to our clients running internal Exchange servers (many of them looking to go to Hosted Exchange 2007), we always ask them what their big pain points are for their Exchange environment. Obviously email archiving, email compliance and e-Discovery are high on their radar. But for some customers, simply keeping the email environment up and running is a challenge.
To the end, we recently partnered with Osterman Research, a respected analyst in the email world, to conduct a survey to IT managers on their email needs. The findings reveal that 50 percent of respondents do not currently have an email continuity solution in place. Of those who say they do, nearly half are relying on tape backups.
Why is this, you may ask? Everyone knows that email is mission critical, right? The sad fact is that for most IT departments, there aren't many good alternatives. They could implement clustering and replication solutions for Exchange, but these are often out of the reach of most IT departments in terms of cost and complexity.
And why are backups not sufficient? If you've ever been through an email restore, you know the answers:
- Recovery from backup tapes can take hours, days or weeks.
- During downtime, users have no email service.
- Without business email service, users often resort to using personal email accounts during outages, exposing organizations to security risks, compliance violations and legal liability.
- All data is not recoverable-anything created after the last backup is permanently lost. For example, if backups happen daily, all data between the last day's backup and the outage is unrecoverable.
How Does It Work?
Customers can sign up for free email continuity today. Once you sign up, one of our messaging experts will contact you to get you setup. You should be up in running a matter of a few days or less. You only have to make two changes to your environment:
- Change your DNS "MX" record (the record in DNS that routes your email) to route through LiveOffice's secure, rock-solid data centers. This allows you to use LiveOffice for email if your internal mail servers are down.
- Configure your Exchange server to "journal" (send a copy in the background of) all email to our data centers.
Once you're setup, you have peace of mind, knowing that if your mail server were to fail, your employees can continue with secure, compliant business email during the downtime.
Specifically, if your internal mail server goes down, you simply call us or login to the LiveOffice Mail Continuity administration console to "flip the switch" and have your employees start using LiveOffice for their email temporarily.
The best thing about it is that employees can continue to use their existing Microsoft Outlook email client. During downtime, they simply click on a special folder in Outlook. In that folder, they'll see all of their recent sent and received email and will be able to compose, reply to and forward email just as if their Exchange server was up and running.
When your system is back up internally, simply "flip the switch" back and LiveOffice will automatically forward queued email back to your environment and go back to being your "insurance policy" for your mail server.
For more details, see our detailed description and our list of Frequently-Asked Questions.
It Can't Be Free? What's the Catch?
It really is free. You don't have to buy anything else from us. I know this feels like one of those cell phone commercials and you're looking for caveats, asterisks and fine print, but you won't find any.
We just are big believers in software-as-a-service email and think that free email continuity is a great way for customers to take a step toward running their email "in the cloud."
In addition, customers that use Mail Continuity are also fully setup for LiveOffice Mail Archive. If they decide they want to start archiving their email for mailbox management, e-discovery and compliance purposes, they simply can call us, sign up for a plan and start using Mail Archive with no additional setup.
At this price, just think what we could do with $700 billion!
