Tue, April 07, 2009 — The Software as a Service (SaaS) model for e-mail solutions is proving attractive for many customers and will represent 20 percent of the commercial e-mail market by the end of 2012, according to Gartner.

Gartner analysts said that the impact of the SaaS model for e-mail will have direct and material consequences for traditional third-party product vendors, effectively cutting the addressable market for traditional third-party applications by one-fifth. However, by 2012, the move to the SaaS model for e-mail will create opportunities for new third-party applications.

"The lost opportunity to the traditional third-party market may be more than 20 percent because the earliest adopters of the e-mail SaaS model are small or midsize businesses (SMBs), which can represent up to 40 percent of the market when measured by the number of companies which are likely prospects," said Matt Cain, research vice president at Gartner. "However, SMBs are less likely to buy third-party tools compared to larger organizations."

According to Gartner, there are four general categories within the third-party community for e-mail services that will be affected to a greater or lesser extent by the move to the SaaS model for e-mail.

Applications Core to Running Premises-Based E-mail

Examples include disaster recovery, reporting, backup, spam and virus filtering. In this case, the need for most third-party management applications goes away in a SaaS deployment as the vendor provides all core level two and three help desk duties, supplies all required services for redundancy and recovery, provides all reporting options, performs all version upgrade functions, and protects the perimeter with its own spam and virus filters.

Applications That Extend the Core Services of the E-mail Platform

Examples include mobility, fax, archive and encryption. Most SaaS vendors offer archive and encryption services, although they may source them from a third party. Fax services can fare better; in some cases a native SaaS implementation exists, and in others, customer-side fax services will be integrated with a SaaS system.

Client-Side Applications

Examples include PST management and e-mail efficiency add-ins. There will be no immediate impact on vendors that work on the client side of the e-mail SaaS equation because the present paradigm is for rich clients to access SaaS resources. The longer-term concern, however, is that the prevalent storage model will move from the client (PST) to a server side storage model -- hence eliminating the need for PST management tools altogether -- and the default access mechanism moves to the browser, away from "fat" client access. A continued market for e-mail efficiency add-ins is likely, but vendors would need to shift browser plug-ins.