Grant Holliday

(Disclosure: This is not a paid or unpaid advertisement. It’s purely based on my own personal experiences. I feel strongly about Software As A Service (SaaS) and Microsoft’s Software plus Services strategy.)

It’s no secret that businesses are becoming more reliant on Email. One thing I realised recently when I left Readify was how addicted I was to not just email - but the whole Outlook + Exchange server experience.

I love Outlook, Outlook Web Access and Exchange ActiveSync. It’s great being able to rock up to any Internet browser and logon to webmail. It’s great being able to ActiveSync my phone, contacts and calendar over the air. I was feeling uneasy about returning to IMAP/POP/Gmail/Live based email.

Small Business in Australia

I started thinking about my situation. Surely there’s other people in my situation. It turns out that there’s A LOT of people. The Australian Bureau of Statistics defines Small Business as those with less than 20 employees. These businesses provide over 40% of the jobs in the country.

Statistics from ABS cat. no. 8127.0 - Characteristics of Small Business, Australia (Reissue), 2004:

• 1.6 million small business in Australia
• 71% of small business use the Internet (1.1 million businesses)
• 87% of these use email (988,320 business)
• 56% of small businesses are non-employers
• 33% of small businesses employ 1-4 people
• 11% of small businesses employ 5-19 people

There you have it, in 2004 there was almost a million businesses with less than 20 employees that “used email” as part of their business.

The DIY On-Site Exchange Option

These are very rough numbers (I’m open to comments & suggestions), but let’s imagine the following scenario:

• A company with 100 employees (and 100 mailboxes)
• A Network Engineer with an annual salary of $70,000 (based on Ambit recruitment’s it&t salary survey)
• They spend 1 day a week dealing with Exchange (20%) of their time. This includes backup, maintenance, upgrades, etc. They might service more than one business.
• A physical server at a capital cost of $6000 over 3 years.
• Data centre / co-location costs of $300/month (e.g. AussieHQ)
• Licensing
  • Exchange Server 2007 Standard @ ~$2,234 (inc. 5 CALs) (from ht.com.au)
  • 95x Client Access Licenses @ ~$150 each = $14,250 (from ht.com.au)
  • 100x Outlook 2007 @ $179 each = $17,900 (from ht.com.au)
  • Total licensing: $34,384

The Hosted Exchange Option

Recently I was talking to Nick Randolph over dinner at SecurityCampOz. Somehow we got onto who he uses for Hosted Exchange. It turns out he’s been using IT Solutions Now (http://www.exchangemailhosting.com/) for a few years. So the next day I signed up. The process was extremely painless - click sign-up link, enter personal details, enter credit card number, 5 minutes later I’m provisioned and connected - all automated processes.

$11 AUD per month, per mailbox includes:

• Outlook 2007 License,
• Unlimited Mailbox size,
• Unlimited Mailbox aliases,
• Unlimited 24×7 Live Tech Support,
• Full Outlook MAPI access,
• Outlook Web Access, and
• Exchange ActiveSync

So what do the costs for our example business of 100 employees look like?

That’s 75% saving of the DIY option. And 0% of the headaches.

If you want your data located in Australia, or you want to deal with an Australian company - WebCentral also do Exchange hosting at $19.95 / month / 500mb storage. Although, you have to phone a real person during business hours to get connected too.

Still don’t believe me that hosted services are a good option? Read some of the Microsoft Exchange case studies. The one on how a company recovered from Hurricane Katrina by moving to Hosted Exchange is pretty compelling.