How much does e-mail really cost in your organization?

We’re about to publish the results of a major new study on hosted messaging. As part of that study, we asked messaging-oriented decision-makers about the cost of providing messaging capabilities within their organizations, and found a couple of interesting things.

First, most messaging decision-makers really don’t know how much it costs their organization to provide messaging capabilities. For example, when asked how closely they track the total cost of their messaging system, more than three in five survey respondents told us either a) that they could provide these figures to us after some work with their finance department or b) that they would have a hard time figuring out the total cost of their messaging system.

Second, more than three out of four decision-makers believe that it costs $10 per seat per month or less to provide messaging services. Our cost modeling, however, indicates that the cost is significantly higher than that when evaluating all of the costs associated with evaluating, deploying and managing a messaging system.

There are some important takeaways from these findings. While the findings above indicate that messaging decision-makers don’t track costs all that closely, that is by no means meant to be a slam against these people. Messaging has become a utility in most organizations, a necessary and critical component of the infrastructure. As a result, in the short term it really doesn’t matter what the cost of messaging is, just like it’s not critical to know how much water, electricity or natural gas cost, since you absolutely must have these services to run your business. Hence, there’s no critical need to understand these costs on a day-to-day basis.

Longer term, however, it is important to understand the true cost of providing messaging capabilities. For example, when the time comes to upgrade your messaging system, it’s important to be able to know the actual cost of your existing system so that you can make well-informed decisions about the upgrade or alternatives. It’s important to know the cost of providing messaging security capabilities so that you can make well-informed decisions about which delivery model to deploy: software, appliances or managed services. It’s also important to know the cost of messaging so that you can make good decisions about the opportunity cost of providing messaging services, since this will help you know if you should devote your IT staff to messaging management or to some other initiative.

In short, any organization should conduct a full evaluation of its messaging costs at some point in order to make good decisions about alternatives or enhancements to its existing messaging capabilities.