Hi, >>> Just lost another one, dammit. Small company with about 6 mailboxes who >>> some consultant gave them a song and dance about how Gmail's such a >>> better mail service since "they don't get any spam" >> >> The trend towards email service providers for companies to host their >> mailboxes has been accelerating for about the past 6 to 12 months. I >> don't know whether there was any specific trigger (Exchange version >> upgrade-related, possibly?). >> > > The specific trigger is in 2012 Microsoft announced SBS would be terminated. (SBS 2011) is the last. > > For a company to field exchange 2012 server for 5 people is about $20K. That is licensing, server hardware and expertise to put it together. Our "other" consultancy is a windows shop and we can roll these if anyone wants them. > > When SBS 2011 shipped you could do Exchange for 5 users for around $5K > for the licensing and hardware and expertise. > > I'm not going to go into the technical changes Microsoft made in the > new version of Exchange that tripled the costs, just trust me they are there. > > A couple years ago we sold around 6 exchange servers a year. Once > MS "graduated" everyone to the new version of exchange, we haven't > sold any. Sold SB Essentials but that's not Exchange.
We recently lost a small-business customer to Comcast. They have about 150 employees and needed better collaboration tools, calendaring, contacts, and shared resources which we really can't provide with just open source tools. Comcast was offering all of this with spam/virus for like $400/mo or less. We just can't compete in that market. Much of our business now is front-ending Exchange. However, another problem we're experiencing is that, with the latest Exchange, is no more IMAP/POP to public folders, so there's no real way for us to receive spam/ham samples for analysis from them over the Internet. Ideas for solving this problem would be appreciated. For the issue regarding users going to Gmail, I like to dig up problems with their service that people from notable companies have had, or articles from PC Week, and the like, about service outages, lost email, data-mining and privacy issues, etc. Our users want regular reports, but the actual end-users never really see that. It's only some levels of management that ever see it, and I don't think they really have a concept of just how much spam they would be receiving. We're in a commodity business. It's no longer the efficacy that differentiates us - it's service, price, privacy, features (user tools, webmail, mobile capabilities), etc. Regards, Alex
