In her last few posts (here and here), Melanie Turek has highlighted some Frost & Sullivan research that predicts strong growth in hosted email. Now there's a big announcement of a major IBM-based hosted email deployment of some 380,000 seats by Panasonic.
The Reuters article linked above also quotes a Panasonic exec as saying the company expects to outsource more of its IT applications in the future, suggesting that cloud computing is becoming real at least for some enterprises.
I almost hesitated to post this on the heels of my earlier post on the Wainhouse numbers for managed/hosted UC (and, for that matter, on the heels of Melanie's posts), because I think you can create a kind of stampede mentality that distorts how quickly things are moving. But I think this is worth noting because:
1. I expect there will be more about this deployment and this trend at Lotusphere next week;
2. This is, in fact, a pretty big deal, and it does go a ways toward validating email in the cloud.
I'm taking managed/hosted communications a lot more seriously than I ever used to; the idea of hosting your PBX in the network never particularly caught on, I assume for good reason, but it seems to me that enterprises really are starting to look at all their communications applications in a software context, which means that all of them become candidates for the cloud. Whether a given enterprise takes that route or not depends on the host of factors that complex technology decisions always depend on--the current state of your implementation and legacy technology; your budget situation; your vendor relationships; individual technology-religious convictions; and your strategic plans (if you have them).
But it seems clear that the cloud will be an element in everyone's decision-making, so none of us can afford to give it short shrift.
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