Atlanta - Businesses with up to 1,000 employees may soon find outsourcing their e-mail a more attractive option, says Software.com, Inc. The Santa Clara, Calif.-based company unveiled products designed to deliver on that proposition at SuperComm '98 in Atlanta this week.
Software.com's new InterMail 4.0 line of high-volume messaging servers will be pitched to ISPs and telcos as a set of tools for fashioning multi-tiered menus of e-mail services aimed at small to medium-sized businesses.
Whether those companies being targeted will take to outsourcing, however, remains an open question, according to industry experts.
The InterMail 4.0 line includes: support for basic Post Office Protocol mail and the more advanced Internet Message Access Protocol; service level agreements; an interface that allows the subscriber company to partition and administer accounts; and new spam controls. Software.com touts its servers as being capable of scaling to anywhere from 250,000 to several million users.
One of Software.com's ISP customers said he is anxious to take advantage of the added features in InterMail 4.0 and pitch outsourced e-mail at companies of up to 200 employees. Michael Bolduc, Director of product management for GTE.NET, said his company foresees a potential for up to two million small-business customers nationwide.
In addition, GTE.NET's parent company, GTE Internetworking, is actively considering ways to attract enterprise corporate clients to outsourced e-mail, Bolduc said. "It looks like a very sound business opportunity for us," he added.
One analyst believes the that outsourced e-mail does have a future, albeit a limited one.
"The outsourcing model, where the ISPs would be outsourcing corporate e-mail, has great potential in the small-business area," said David Marshak, an analyst with the Boston-based Patricia Seybold Group.
However, larger companies and those that already have in-house e-mail systems are unlikely adopt or switch to outside service providers, according to Marshak. These companies, he said, will balk at relinquishing control over an application that is so critical to their internal business communications.
"As long as internal e-mail is the way that companies are run, " Marshak said, "giving that up to an ISP ... is a worrisome proposition."
Available immediately, the various versions of InterMail run on UNIX operating systems from Sun Microsystems, Inc., Digital Equipment Corp., and Silicon Graphics, Inc. InterMail Post.Office, which is appropriate for corporate enterprise use, also runs on Windows NT.
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