Outsourcing Email Not an Easy Choice

I ran across this article just surfing the web and thought that it was kind of interesting, here’s an excerpt:

Email is fast emerging as the Achilles heel of firms’ compliance and legal strategies, prompting many organizations to outsource their email archiving to third parties. Despite vendors’ claims, however, storage managers should not see outsourcing as an automatic ticket to cost savings.

Here’s a copy of my response:

Email Outsourcing is something that I wouldn’t have bet the bank on a few years ago but it’s a trend that I think is here to stay.

I am a partner in a small web development and managed hosting firm, Pleth Networks, http://www.pleth.com, and about 2 years ago we started offering our premium email solution, Plethware, http://www.pleth.com/services=email_overview.htm, and our sales have almost doubled.

Granted, I might be a little biased, but I happen to think that we have a pretty good solution in place as far as email goes. Built in spam protection, online storage, ajax interface, outlook compatability, mobile compatability, etc., are all components that have helped propel our solution in the marketplace and make email our top solution in terms of sales.

What I do find surprising is the amount of requests we get from large corporations wanting to shift their email to firms like ours. We have seen requests from firms with as few as 30-40 accounts to clients with upwards of 2500 accounts express an interest in our product.

You would think that there would be an added expense involved with outsourcing that many accounts for firms of this size but apparently many studies have been done in due diligence reports that reflect a significant cost savings to firms wishing to outsource their email.

I think that this is a trend that we won’t soon see changing for a couple of reasons. The primary reason would be for compliance issues that are being mandated across just about every vertical market out there and secondly because it just makes sense for corporations to lighten the load of their already overworked IT departments.

Cotton Rohrscheib, Partner
Pleth Networks, LLC
http://www.pleth.com
http://www.cottonrohrscheib.com/blog

Here’s a link to the article: Outsourcing Email Not an Easy Choice – Storage Networking News Analysis – Byte and Switch