 Unified CommunicationsNetwork World's Unified Communications Newsletter, 10/09/07Hosted communications for the enterpriseBy Michael OstermanLast week, Microsoft announced its online offerings, focused on messaging and unified communications, aimed squarely at the enterprise market, not small to midsized businesses. These offerings, which include Exchange, SharePoint and Office Communications Server, are focused solely on organizations with 5,000 or more seats. This is in contrast to the traditional focus of hosted messaging and unified communication offerings that are aimed primarily at the SMB market. Although many don’t believe that hosting makes sense for large enterprises, there are many situations in which it clearly makes sense. For example, there is a distinct difference between a 5,000-seat organization in which all employees are housed in a few buildings on a single campus, and a 5,000-seat organization that has 100 seats at a corporate headquarters facility and 49 people in each of 100 satellite offices scattered across the country. The latter is, at least in the context of deploying a messaging or unified communications system, simply 46 SMBs that just happened to be owned by the same company. In this situation, hosting makes a great deal of sense, since the in-house cost of provisioning 46 different facilities and providing IT support for users and resources in multiple time zones can be much higher than if the solution is hosted by a third party. I’m certainly a proponent of the hosted model, but I’m also a proponent of the on-premise model. Each has their place and both should be considered (including hybrid solutions) depending on the needs of a particular enterprise. What organizations need to do is to follow a three-step approach to making decisions about hosted and managed offerings. First, understand your true cost of ownership for providing solutions internally – many organizations underestimate these costs. Second, evaluate what your messaging and unified communications requirements will be for the next several years and determine if you will have the resources to satisfy these requirements. Third, evaluate hosted and managed options objectively – many decision makers are dead-set against hosted/managed options based on concerns that often are not valid.
Following these steps will help your organization to pursue solutions that are the best fit for your current and future requirements. We have published a guide to evaluating hosted and managed messaging services that you can download at no charge here.
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| Contact the author: For webinars or research on messaging, or to join the Osterman Research market research survey panel, go here. Osterman Research helps organizations understand the markets for messaging and directory related offerings. To e-mail Michael, click here. ARCHIVEArchive of the Unified Communications Newsletter. BONUS FEATUREIT PRODUCT RESEARCH AT YOUR FINGERTIPS Get detailed information on thousands of products, conduct side-by-side comparisons and read product test and review results with Network World’s IT Buyer’s Guides. Find the best solution faster than ever with over 100 distinct categories across the security, storage, management, wireless, infrastructure and convergence markets. Click here for details. PRINT SUBSCRIPTIONS AVAILABLE International subscribers, click here. SUBSCRIPTION SERVICESTo subscribe or unsubscribe to any Network World newsletter, change your e-mail address or contact us, click here. This message was sent to: security.world@gmail.com. Please use this address when modifying your subscription. Advertising information: Write to Associate Publisher Online Susan Cardoza Network World, Inc., 118 Turnpike Road, Southborough, MA 01772 Copyright Network World, Inc., 2007 |
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