Nearly half of enterprises will migrate to Exchange 2010 soon

Survey shows 44% of enterprise organizations plan to migrate to Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 in the next 18 months.

By Microsoft Subnet on Thu, 04/29/10 - 3:03pm.

It's starting to look like Microsoft Exchange 2010 could almost rival Windows 7 for most popular upgrade this year. According to a recent survey of approximately 150 enterprise companies, the plan for nearly half of them is to migrate to the new e-mail platform within the next 18 months.

Bigger is better when it comes to mailboxes, Microsoft says

Azaleos Corp. commissioned the survey conducted by Osterman Research in March 2010 and discovered that 44% of responding enterprises companies with 1,000 or more users intend to migrate to the updated platform sooner rather than later. In the report, "Embracing Exchange 2010: Momentum, Migration and Growth in the New World of Messaging," Osterman Research identified the reasons organizations are considering a migration and some of the factors holding them back as well.

"The research revealed two fundamental catalysts for migrating to a new e-mail platform: the desire to make the infrastructure more flexible, cited by 59% of respondents; and the need to drive down the cost of providing e-mail service for employees," said Michael Osterman, president of Osterman Research, in a statement. "E-mail infrastructure flexibility will become extremely important over the next two to three years as organizations implement unified communications systems, which require moving siloed communications workloads, such as SharePoint and Office Communications Server, into an integrated system."

Respondents listed several reasons for moving to Exchange 2010. For 50% of those polled, large mailbox support would be a key driver. For another 50%, "improvements and flexibility in storage, including storage utilization, footprint and storage options such as Direct Attached Storage," were appealing features of the latest release. Forty-eight percent indicated the built-in archiving, retention policies, transport rules and compliance capabilities would instigate a migration, and 40% said improved high availability and disaster recovery features were driving their plans.

Enterprise companies also listed reasons why they might not be doing a migration to the e-mail platform. For 57%, budget constraints would hold them back from an upgrade, and 31% said they would encounter difficulty in switching to a non-Microsoft e-mail platform. Forty-three percent indicated they were "happy on current non-Microsoft platform product," according to the report.

"The research also reveals that a key trend in e-mail today is IT's readiness to start spending again on e-mail in general," the report reads. "The reality is that most organizations today are being driven by the cloud and hosted e-mail alternatives to re-examine their e-mail infrastructure anyway."

Posted by Denise Dubie

Do you Tweet? Follow Denise Dubie on Twitter here.

Like this post? Check out these others.

Data Protection Manager 2010 Protection Best Practices

After three years effort, Microsoft's open source IronRuby stable and available

Bigger is better when it comes to mailboxes, Microsoft says

Microsoft ... oh how you've changed! (Not)

Understanding How System Center Operations Manager Works

Patch Tuesday brings bevy of critical updates

Plus, visit the Microsoft Subnet web site for more news, blogs, podcasts. Subscribe to all Microsoft Subnet bloggers. Sign up for the bi-weekly Microsoft newsletter. (Click on News/Microsoft News Alert.)
Follow All Microsoft Subnet bloggers on Twitter
Follow Julie Bort on Twitter