* When you need to know the cost of messaging
Most organizations don’t know how much it costs them to provide messaging services to their users, based on the findings of a survey we completed last week.
For example, we found that only about two in five organizations can get within 10% or better of the actual cost of providing messaging services, including the cost of licenses, maintenance and support contracts and the like. Most of the remaining organizations could determine these costs, but it would take some work for them to do so. As a result, many organizations significantly underestimate the cost of providing messaging services.
That said, not knowing the cost of providing messaging services to your users is really no big deal on some level, since you absolutely must provide these services no matter how much it costs. For example, you might not know how much it costs to provide electricity or plumbing for your users, but no matter what it costs you’ll do so anyway.
But what happens if your IT department is swamped with a variety of initiatives that will provide you with an advantage relative to your competition? Do you really want these talented people managing e-mail when they could be adding value to your organization in other ways?
If not, then knowing the cost of providing messaging services becomes very important if you want to evaluate providers of hosted messaging services to replace or supplement some of your internal activities. For example, let’s say you want to want to use a provider of managed e-mail security services that will clean your incoming e-mail of viruses, worms, spam, etc. If you don’t know how much it costs you to provide these services using internally managed servers or appliances, as well as the labor that you invest to provide these capabilities, it will be more difficult to evaluate whether a managed service provider is going to be a bargain or will add to your costs of providing messaging.
Bottom line: If you need to determine whether a managed service provider is a better value than managing capabilities internally – a classic make-or-buy decision we were all taught in school – then you need to know how much messaging costs you.
