There is a real price war going on in the market for email in the cloud. Microsoft and Google lead the dance, followed by IBM and Cisco.
Prices are in a relatively short period of half year by 50 percent. Google set the tone in 2007 with Google Apps Premier Edition, a monthly charge of $ 4.17 per user. Microsoft was late last year to battle Google with its price of hosted Exchange to reduce 10 to $ 5. IBM and Cisco have followed Microsoft in recent months, which is now a status quo arose. The standard price hovering around $ 5 per month.
IBM now has its cloud email with the service at least $ 3 per month put. Microsoft has responded with a $ 2 costing " less desk worker 'webmail service . But Forrester warned that the cost of cloud-based email more than just the monthly subscription. In a previous study showed up to surprise the analysts that nobody apparently knows how much they actually spend on email, Schadler writes in the research.
Total cost is much higer
The standard price should be $ 5 or by e-mail box, going up to a total cost of at least $ 11.33 per user per month, the agency analysts calculated. This is significantly less than in-house email hosting. Then costs are respectively $ 17.83 and $ 13.32.
These costs comprise hardware, software, maintenance, upgrades, labor, storage, email filtering, finance and energy. Support for smartphones and archiving are not included. "Unless you have a company with 50,000 employees and has a highly centralized email platform in the cloud email is less expensive than installed programs," said Schadler. "And will continue too. ”Even if storage technologies improve and licensing costs reduce, installed software will not be cheaper than email in the cloud."
