The Radicati Group: On-Premises Email and Collaboration Market, 2009-2013
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
- Over the past 12 months, the corporate Email and Collaboration market has continued to grow, despite the economic downturn. The worldwide installed base of on-premises email and collaboration mailboxes has reached 450 million accounts in 2009, and will increase to 621 million by year-end 2013. This represents an average annual growth rate of 8% over the next four years.
- Many organizations are continually upgrading to more powerful and feature-rich email and collaboration infrastructures, as vendors are continually expanding the scope of their platforms along many dimensions, such as:
- Improved workgroup collaboration such as calendar sharing, improved contact management, task lists, PIM management, and conversation threading.
- Enhanced security to protect against spam, viruses and all forms of malware.
- Integrated IM and presence awareness.
- Integrated Unified Communications and VoIP functionality.
- Integration with Social Networking sites.
- Integrated support for email archiving, improved content search and information retention policy management.
- Integrated out-of-the-box support for wireless device integration and synchronization.
- Although many of the messaging and collaboration vendors discussed in this study also sell their platforms to service providers for deployment as hosted solutions, this report focuses only on On-Premises Email and Collaboration solutions offered to enterprises.
- Today, the On-Premises Email and Collaboration market is still dominated by two key players, Microsoft with its Exchange Server and IBM with its Lotus Notes/Domino.
- However, there are also a lot of smaller vendors in this market that have built up loyal and growing customer bases by targeting mainly regional government agencies, the education sector, and SMBs.
- The growing popularity of hosted email solutions is beginning to encroach on the on-premises email market, particularly as major players such as Google and Microsoft have entered the market with very low-cost enterprise-grade hosted email and collaboration solutions which offer very attractive feature sets at price points that are highly competitive with on-premises solutions.
- Nevertheless, many customers of all sizes ranging from SMBs to Very Large organizations (>10,000 users) still question whether the cost benefits of hosted solutions truly outweigh the loss of control and perceived privacy and security risks vis-à-vis on premises solutions. Many mid-size and large enterprise customers are cautiously experimenting with hosted solutions through “hybrid” deployments which combine some use of hosted services along with their on-premises deployments.