We have just published a new report on the hosted, software-as-a-service and managed services market for messaging services in North America. Here's some of what we found:

* We found much greater penetration of hosted/SaaS services among smaller firms (up to 2,500 e-mail users). For example, hosted/SaaS messaging was used for roughly 5% of smaller organizations’ users in 2008, growing to 9% by 2010. For larger firms, on the other hand, under 4% of users in these organizations are using hosted/SaaS messaging today, growing significantly by 2010.

* While a significant proportion of organizations believe that inbound content filtering is best performed by hosted, SaaS or managed service providers, far fewer believe this about outbound content filtering. The greater acceptance of outsourced solutions to manage inbound content management reflects the greater familiarity and comfort with the current crop of hosted solutions that provide inbound content filtering. Further, outbound content filtering requires that sensitive corporate data be sent outside the firewall, highlighting many decision makers’ reluctance to allow corporate data to be sent and/or processed outside of the internal network.

* The security of a service provider’s data center is one of the key sticking points in the adoption of hosted or SaaS services. While the security of these providers is often more robust than that of many organizations’ environments, they are often perceived not to be. Our research found that about one-quarter of decision makers believe that hosted and SaaS providers offer a lower level of security than on-premise infrastructure.

* One of the key sticking points for many prospective decision makers is the question of what happens to their data when in the hands of any third party. This is particularly important in the event that a customer wants to end their relationship with the provider and recover all of their data. Only one-third are confident in their ability to get their data back.

Despite many decision makers’ objections, our research found that the adoption of hosted, SaaS and managed services is definitely on the increase as organizations opt to employ these services for a variety of applications.

Michael Osterman is principal analyst of Osterman Research.