Apapting to Customers Needs with Graduated Managed and Cloud Portfolios

Forrester just came out with an interesting report “Should Your Email Live In The Cloud? A Comparative Cost Analysis” (You can get a free copy over at Network World)

Amongst other things the report found that the majority of executives at the target enterprise companies, when asked to estimate, believe their per email box costs where typically 4 times less than the actual costs turned out to be when using a Total Cost of Ownership evaluation approach.

The real interesting thing for me, however, was that the majority of firms asked said they would be pursing a hybrid on premise and cloud approach for their email needs:

Whilst the core mailboxes themselves may be based on CPE (Customer Premise Equipment) – elements of the overall email system would be outsources to one or more cloud providers – this included functionality such as mail filtering, spam filtering, storage and backup, DR and mobile mailboxes.

The insight here for MSP product mangers is that enterprises and SMBs’ rarely make the huge leap to out-tasking an IT function in one step – and the needed for graduated portfolio of offerings so that the end customer can move to a fully outsourced consumption model over time is key to a successful (and very adaptable) value proposition.

Co-location Providers learned this lesson with so called Co-location Plus offerings – with piecemeal offerings such as managed firewall, managed load balancing, DB management, OS management, shared and dedicated storage offers – all designed to penetrate further and further into that customers collocation cage until they look a lot more like a managed customer than a colo customer.

I think we will see the emergence of similar graduated portfolios in the Cloud Provider – addressing the potential compute requirements of the enterprise in bite sized pieces – whether that is burst capacity, on demand development / test environments, failover / DR compute or batch data possessing – the slowly slowly approach is needed to bring the enterprise and SMB to the benefits of out-tasking and cloud.