I had an interesting discussion with the new head of marketing at St. Bernard Software last week about the future of messaging management. The company offers both on-premise appliances and hosted offerings that provide protection from spam, viruses, spyware, threats introduced by instant messaging and peer-to-peer file-sharing systems, etc. The company’s goal is to provide essentially the same capabilities in both on-premise and hosted offerings and let their customers decide the better form factor for delivering these services.

Some companies are taking this approach, but not too many. Most messaging security companies offer either on-premise solutions, either in the form of software that you install on your servers or in self-contained appliances; or they offer hosted or managed solutions that manage these capabilities at their own data center(s).

There are some advantages to offering a hybrid approach, including more choice for customers and the ability to provide a more flexible upgrade path in the future. For example, smaller companies in which the office manager also doubles as the IT manager often will find it more advantageous to use a completely hosted solution because of resource constraints. As that company grows, however, management may decide that it wants to deploy capabilities on-premise that can be managed by dedicated IT staff.

On the other hand, a large company that uses on-premise solutions may decide that adding a new capability is best achieved through a hosted solution. Vendors that offer both don’t force their customers to look for alternative vendors when their preference for service delivery changes.

I’d like to get your take on this approach, particularly if you’re in charge of evaluating security, archiving and other offerings. How preferable is a vendor that offers both on-premise and hosted solutions vs. another vendor that offers one or the other? Please drop me an e-mail with your thoughts.

Michael Osterman is principal analyst of Osterman Research.