Switching Costs

So why would anyone pay high prices when they could deliver e-mail for one-sixth to one-tenth the cost of Exchange?

One reason is that corporate knowledge workers—those whose job it is to discover, create and manage information—actually do use the more complicated collaborative features (document sharing, scheduling and the like) built into Notes and Exchange. In some cases, the low-cost systems lack basic features, such as spellcheckers and mail-filtering rules. And you can’t switch from a full-featured e-mail system to a less capable one without angering at least some end users. "Once you’ve convinced people to use a fork, you don’t want to take that away and convince them to use a spoon," says Mark Levitt, research vice president for collaborative computing at IDC (a sister company to CIO’s publisher).

What’s more, everything you’ve already spent on e-mail to date is a sunk cost. You’re not getting that money back, even if you switch. "Although commodity e-mail systems may look cheap on paper, the ongoing maintenance of your existing e-mail system may not be as expensive as switching," says Matt Cain, senior vice president at Meta Group. Finally, switching e-mail platforms requires your IT staff to install and support a new system (a major retraining headache) and to migrate user accounts and data.

The bottom line? "I don’t think there is such a thing as cheap e-mail, particularly if it’s got the capabilities everybody wants," says Robert Moon, CIO and vice president of information services for ViewSonic, whose e-mail system is based on Oracle Collaboration Suite.

Lower Cost of Ownership

Commodity e-mail systems do, however, offer some powerful advantages that lend themselves to situations where basic e-mail is all you need—such as providing e-mail to deskless workers or to users who are not computer savvy.

First and foremost is the lower cost of ownership. Commodity mail systems are based on robust, standard, open Internet mail protocols, such as SMTP, POP3 and IMAP. They run on standard hardware and may use the same back-end data stores as the rest of your enterprise. They can deliver e-mail to end users via Web interfaces (much like Hotmail or Yahoo mail), to standard POP clients such as Eudora or in some cases even to Microsoft Outlook, all of which may simplify client maintenance headaches.

Lotus Workplace Messaging, for example, uses industry-standard J2EE code running on IBM’s WebSphere, stores its data in a DB2 database and delivers mail via webpages. If you’re already running those systems for, say, your Web applications, you can get significant economies of scale by running e-mail on the same platform. (By contrast, Domino uses a proprietary data store, has its own programming language, and generally requires the bulky and idiosyncratic Notes client.)