Southwest Airlines wanted to give e-mail accounts to each of its pilots, flight attendants and ground-crew workers—critical employees who needed to be in the corporate loop but didn’t even have computers. The problem: It would have been prohibitively expensive to give all 30,000 of them accounts on the corporate mail system, Novell GroupWise. It wasn’t just the license fees. Shannon Kessner, manager of Intel core services at Southwest, says that the company would have needed to buy—and manage—at least 30 new servers.

Instead, Southwest chose a more lightweight e-mail system, Novell’s NetMail. In early 2002, the company provided e-mail accounts to all 30,000 "deskless" employees using a fault-tolerant array of just three servers. Those employees check their mail using Web browsers, usually from home or from PCs installed in airport terminals. Meanwhile, the 8,000 corporate employees with desks still use GroupWise, which includes the collaborative features that they need. Southwest saves money on software licensing: Fees for NetMail are typically $12 to $15 per user, says Novell, compared with about $70 per user for GroupWise. And the airline also saves on administration costs because the new system is simple, stable and requires little maintenance. "We’ve had very few problems with it at all," says Kessner.

Like Southwest, many companies are discovering that corporate e-mail systems don’t have to be expensive to be effective. In many cases, simple, stripped-down mail servers fit the bill quite nicely. But that doesn’t mean you should rip out your Exchange or Domino servers tomorrow.

Expensive E-Mail

Microsoft Exchange and IBM Domino/Notes dominate the corporate e-mail world. Together, the packages own nearly 90 percent of the Global 2000 e-mail market, and that dominance will continue through 2007, according to Meta Group. However, these products are expensive. Mix in costs for maintenance, administration, upgrades, training and downtime, and the average cost of providing e-mail during a three-year period tops $18.45 per user per month for Exchange and $12.55 for Domino, according to The Radicati Group, a consulting and market research company. Add in the platforms and network infrastructure required to run these systems, and the fully loaded, monthly per-user cost soars to $36.56 for Exchange and $33.88 for Domino.

Fortunately, fully functioning corporate e-mail systems can be had for far less. According to Radicati, Oracle Collaboration Suite averages $5.40 per user per month ($16.25 including the infrastructure costs) and Sun One Messaging Server costs $8.04 ($17.80 including infrastructure).

If you’re willing to forego the more advanced features offered by those high-end products, the cost drops to the floor. Sendmail recently announced a partnership with Hewlett-Packard and Intel to provide corporate e-mail (called Workforce Mail) for a total cost of $1 to $2 per user per month, while IBM claims that its new, low-cost Lotus Workplace Messaging can do the same for less than $1.