Keeping a Tight Grip on E-mail

Computerworld - You may be wondering if your company can benefit by outsourcing its messaging. For most organizations, it all comes down to how vital e-mail is to their daily operations.

"We have [news and information] content we pass around the globe," says Aggie Cutrone, senior director of desktop operations and messaging at New York-based magazine publisher Time Inc. "It's all rapid-fire. There are dozens of magazines, all different deadlines and all different product cycles. There are reporters all over the world literally every day."

Cutrone says Time hasn't considered moving e-mail to an outside vendor because it is so crucial to its operations and 14,000 worldwide e-mail account users. To ensure that e-mail is always available, the company continues to operate those critical systems on its own, says Cutrone.

That's not unusual. In fact, customers haven't embraced e-mail outsourcing over the past few years as vendors hoped they would, says Robert Mahowald, an analyst at IDC. Customers tend to outsource their whole collaboration applications, including e-mail as a component, rather than outsourcing e-mail as a stand-alone application. For some customers, hosted e-mail alone "didn't make sense from a privacy, management and security standpoint," he says.

One indicator of that trend is the declining number of Microsoft Corp. certified partners offering hosted Exchange e-mail services. In 2000, 30 partners were available, Mahowald says. In 2001, that number dropped to 11, and today it's just seven. The market hasn't taken off because "some large [user] companies have just not trusted the model. It's really a complex process to integrate," Mahowald says.

Controlling What's Critical
Two years ago, when Time moved its e-mail systems from CC:Mail to Exchange 2000 and Outlook, obsolete equipment was replaced and the entire system was revamped. But operations were kept in-house to maintain systems management and control because of e-mail's critical nature, says Cutrone.

She says she's not against outsourcing. In fact, Time does outsource some applications. But those decisions are made system by system, Cutrone says. "For us, we'd never even consider [outsourcing e-mail]. It's not that we don't look at outsourcing at all. We do it where it makes sense," she says.

But Hadley Reynolds, an analyst at Delphi Group, says the desire to maintain tight control over e-mail shouldn't automatically rule out outsourcing. "It's not the issue of where the processing gets done physically, it's the whole issue of setting policies," which can also be tightly maintained by an e-mail hosting provider, he says. "It doesn't matter where it is. That's what service-level agreements and outsourcing management agreements are all about. Technical deployment issues are the least of the problem."

David Ferris, an analyst at Ferris Research Inc., says companies that outsource are usually smaller and welcome the chance to offload their complicated, management-intensive e-mail systems. "Larger companies don't want to outsource their e-mail," Ferris says, particularly because the systems are too important to their operations and they don't want to give up direct oversight. Other reasons are technical. Exchange, for example, requires high data rates for off-site mail servers, which increases costs and complexity, he says.

Hosting Through a Bad Patch
One organization that chose outsourcing is the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation in Bethesda, Md., a nonprofit that supports more than 115 cystic fibrosis care centers nationwide. CFF outsourced its e-mail function several years ago because the organization's internal IT department was "in shambles," says CIO Greg August.

CFF has about 650 e-mail accounts, but those users are spread throughout approximately 80 offices and some 200 hospitals, making its e-mail infrastructure complicated. August says his predecessors chose to outsource to USinternetworking Inc. in Annapolis, Md., "because of a lack of confidence in the IT staff." But while August says he's been happy with the arrangement with USinternetworking, ongoing improvements in his IT staff and rising costs for outsourcing will likely have him reviewing whether he will renew the contract in about 18 months. "It's served us pretty well," says August. "It's just a completely different landscape now. We're right on the brink of bringing some things back in-house."

For many companies, maintaining control of e-mail with in-house staff is more appealing than turning it over to a vendor, says Mahowald. In a multisite organization with more than 5,000 users, "don't even bother to look at [outsourcing]," he says. "You are going to find that it's going to be more of a headache than it's worth." But, he adds, smaller organizations should "absolutely give it a try."