Enterprise email is the one true “killer application.” But why is it still so expensive and complicated? There are alternatives that are at least as good functionality-wise, but far cheaper when it comes to total cost of ownership.
Enterprise email has been called the one true “killer application” that every company needs. No other business application even comes close. And while Microsoft Exchange enjoys the lion’s share of the market, many companies struggle to support it with the people they have.
Exchange is a complex and cantankerous product and it takes a fairly technical person or group of people to maintain it in a corporate environment. In addition, there are some hefty hardware and OS requirements to operate this application. Exchange is indeed a killer application — a budget killer, that is.
ANALYSIS: Can open source replace Microsoft Exchange?
Wouldn’t it be nice to have the same (or better) functionality provided by Exchange, but at a fraction of the cost and with far lower administrative needs? This is the value proposition put forth by SmarterTools Inc. with SmarterMail, a full-collaboration, enterprise-quality email platform. SmarterMail costs pennies per month per mailbox, compared to tens of dollars per mailbox on a monthly basis.
The cost savings come largely from vastly smaller licensing fees and management and maintenance requirements. In its white paper “SmarterMail 8.x and Microsoft Exchange: An Administrative Comparison,” SmarterTools offers a cost comparison based on 250 mailboxes: The base license for SmarterMail Mail Server is $499 versus $3,979 for Exchange; the Client Access License is included in the SmarterMail Mail Server base price, whereas the license for 250 clients on Exchange is $25,000.
By the time you add in additional features such as anti-spam, antivirus, ActiveSync, hardware and upgrade protection, the total cost of SmarterMail Mail Server is $3,794 versus a total cost of $32,953 for Exchange. That’s easily a savings of more than 80% on product alone.
Lower cost is certainly one of the reasons why Windows hosting provider Applied Innovations in Florida chose SmarterMail as the platform of choice for its mail hosting customers. “It doesn’t make sense for us to deploy Microsoft Exchange in our environment,” says CEO Jess Coburn. “With the cost of the product, the hardware requirements and the amount of labor involved, Exchange is too expensive. SmarterMail is superior to Exchange with its cost, ease of administration, and ability to get it up and running quickly.”
As a mail platform, SmarterMail has been around for fewer than 10 years, giving it the advantage of not carrying old legacy code in its code base. As a result, it runs leaner than Exchange. SmarterMail installed on one server can handle up to 20,000 mailboxes with full enterprise functionality. Other email solutions require two to five servers to accomplish the same density. What’s more, SmarterMail can accomplish it with stability; you don’t have to reboot the email server daily or weekly as is often the case with Exchange.
SmarterMail is also said to reduce the need for administrative support and lower the level of technical expertise required by administrators through heavy doses of automation. A robust API allows linkages between SmarterMail and other applications. For example, you can automatically provision mailboxes by a third party solution such as an HR application when new employees are hired.
Automation also tends to other activities commonly performed by an administrator: resetting passwords, changing mailbox limits, provisioning disk space quotas, detecting and blocking intrusions, and more. SmarterMail even has an automated function to migrate mailboxes from Exchange. As for reducing administrative needs, SmarterMail watches itself and lets you know if there’s a problem it can’t fix on its own.
The company claims SmarterMail achieves 96% anti-spam filtering right out of the box, and adding a third party tool from Commtouch for a few hundred dollars ratchets that up to 99.5%. Moreover, what you do with spam can be automated as well: Quarantine it, delete it, send it to an alternate mailbox for analysis — just keep it from getting to end users’ inboxes.
You can use ActiveSync with SmarterMail in order to push email out to users’ smart devices. This is becoming critical as more and more people need (or at least expect) to have mobile access to email.
Applied Innovations has been using SmarterMail since about 2004. In fact, it started with version 1.0. “We use it for all managed customers because a lot of these guys want to have their own mail servers,” Coburn says. “This is where features like ActiveSync, calendaring and contacts come into play and get used the most. The customers are happy with SmarterMail and the functionality it provides. And with the lower cost of the product, my company is able to make a little money while still keeping costs low for our customers.”
Email as the one true killer application doesn’t have to kill your budget. Now there are worthy alternatives to Microsoft Exchange that can really reduce your costs.
Linda Musthaler is a principal analyst with Essential Solutions Corporation. You can write to her at LMusthaler@essential-iws.com.
Essential Solutions researches the practical value of information technology, and how it can make individual workers and entire organizations more productive. Essential Solutions offers consulting services to computer industry and corporate clients to help define and fulfill the potential of IT.
