Wed, July 11, 2007 — CIO — When global staffing firm Adecco Group began an effort one year ago to consolidate and outsource its five data centers into one, Dave Bossi came to the realization that moving the data center would also move three separately managed Microsoft Exchange e-mail servers of different versions and a fourth legacy e-mail technology—with potentially huge disruption to 10,000 e-mail users. Bossi, the North American vice president of IT, thought this might be an opportunity to rethink the company’s e-mail strategy. “E-mail tends to get lost in the mix. It becomes an afterthought,” Bossi says. Unless, of course, something goes wrong.

Bossi’s case for outsourcing broke down like this: If Adecco moved the e-mail servers to a separate outsourced provider, the e-mail systems would be unaffected in the event of any trouble (like network overloads) at Adecco’s data center. Having a dedicated e-mail provider also makes administering e-mail accounts, managing servers and handling frequent software patches more efficient and less dependent on other data center resources. It shifts the responsibility for malware protection to a specialist—and eliminates the need to manage anti-malware appliances. CIO Alwin Brunner liked Bossi’s logic. Adecco is consolidating its four e-mail platforms into one, which is hosted by USA.net (separate from Adecco’s outsourced data center that IBM manages).

Today, Bossi and Brunner say they’re very happy with the performance and lower cost of e-mail outsourcing. For example, Adecco cut its e-mail administrator staff in half to three people and repurposed much of the physical infrastructure to other projects, saving thousands of dollars and eliminating the need for future equipment purchases.

Like Adecco, an increasing number of large enterprises are deciding that e-mail is mission-critical but is plain-vanilla enough to be outsourced, says Mark Levitt, vice president of collaborative computing at IDC, (a sister company to CIO’s publisher). The proliferation of malware is also pushing the trend, says Don DePalma, president of consultancy Common Sense Advisory. Now that spam accounts for more than half of all e-mail messages, many businesses are looking to outsource message filtering because the internal burden has gotten too great. This is often the first step a company takes toward eventually outsourcing the entire e-mail burden.

Smaller Firms Lead the Way
Small companies—those with fewer than 100 employees—have gotten the jump on outsourcing e-mail, IDC’s Levitt notes. More than half of all small-business e-mail accounts are now outsourced or under consideration for outsourcing, according to a recent IDC survey. Lack of IT resources tends to drive small companies toward outsourcing much of their IT operations, and e-mail has gone along for that ride.