E-mail Adoption Rates Slow

InfoWorld

Moore, Cathleen

January 29, 2003

     Originally Published:20030120.

     MESSAGING

     ALTHOUGH MESSAGING heavyweights Microsoft and IBM continue to pump new platform upgrades into the market, enterprise adoption of new releases has lagged under the pressure of shrinking IT budgets and the considerable effort required to upgrade.

     IBM last fall shipped Version 6 of its Notes/Domino messaging infrastructure, and Microsoft plans to roll out an updated version of Exchange in mid-- 2003.

     Meanwhile, Oracle, Novell, and a host of smaller vendors are attempting to grab messaging market share with promises of lower ownership costs and improved scalability and flexibility.

     Although Exchange 2000 has garnered somewhat low penetration because of a difficult upgrade that also requires enterprises to migrate to Active Directory and Windows 2000, the next version due midyear should see strong adoption, according to Michael Osterman, president of Black Diamond, Wash.-based Osterman Research.

     The upgrade, formerly dubbed Titanium, will be called Exchange Server 2003 and will carry the same code as Exchange 2000, according to officials at Redmond, Wash.-based Microsoft.

     "People are waiting for Titanium in June. Coupled with the soft economy and all the work that goes on behind the scenes to adopt Exchange 2000, a lot of companies are taking a wait-and-see attitude, still running 5.5 and waiting for Titanium," Osterman said.

     Osterman said he expects to see "a big jump to Titanium, because the economy will be able to support it with more IT spending and because you'll be able to leapfrog Exchange 2000."

     Similarly, enterprises have been slow to jump into Armonk, N.Y.-- based IBM's Notes/Domino 6, but 2003 should bring fairly significant adoption of the new platform, Osterman added.

     Although the market has been largely dominated by Exchange and Domino, competing vendors are eyeing opportunities to lower infrastructure costs and win customers who are grappling with potentially disruptive migration paths.

     In June Oracle will unveil Release 2 of its Collaboration Suite, which was first introduced 11 months ago. The offering provides integrated e-mail, voice mail, calendaring, file sharing, search, and IM accessible from Outlook, Web browsers, and wireless devices. Oracle claims lower TCO (total cost of ownership) and better scalability gained from leveraging its Oracle 9i Database.

     "Running [a messaging platform] on top of [a] database allows you to scale. The reason why Lotus and Microsoft need to run large numbers of small servers is scalability," said Steve Levine, vice president of marketing at Redwood Shores, Calif.-- based Oracle.

     Meanwhile, Provo, Utah-based Novell plans to introduce Version 6.5 of its GroupWise messaging application in February, focusing on lowered TCO and new anti-spam features, and Mill Valley, Calif.-- based Stalker Software is positioning its Communicate Pro messaging server as a cost-effective drop-in replacement for Exchange Server.

     One Notes/Domino customer Kemet, an electronic components manufacturer based in Greenville, S.C., adopted Version 6 to leverage a number of server-side features including spam control and e-mail compression algorithms.

     "There are significant savings in these [areas] that we can document," said Matthew Henry, technical architect of the advanced technology team at Kemet.

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