What is the future of email?

Email remains a core technology in many organisations, yet every new social media technology is said to be its replacement. This CIO Debate will discuss through a series of articles whether it is time to reassess email as a technology, the infrastructure behind it and what role email plays in our organisations and whether it is time to consider other technologies?

Over the course of this Debate we plan to discuss every area of email. The Debate kicks off with an interview with an email infrastructure provider who argues it’s time for CIOs to re-assess their email infrastructure and modernise for greater RoI.

Our editorial partners for the Debate channel MWD Advisors are going to discuss a the growing number of web-based business email solutions which are entering the market know – of course the most well-known is Google’s Gmail as part of Google Apps, but there are other big names also in the market now, including IBM with LotusLive iNotes and Cisco with Cisco Webex Mail. While at the moment Microsoft Exchange and Outlook continues to dominate the market, there is an emerging shift within the enterprise market which is seeing people questioning the scale of investment they place in managing their existing email infrastructures – often a massive cost given that this is not a core line-of-business system, and looking at the alternatives within the market, including webmail as well as using hosting providers or outsourcing their email infrastucture management.

MWD Advisorsalso plan to discuss the growing recognition of the need to collaborate more is shifting the role that email plays within a collaboration strategy. For several years the emphasis on the vendor front has been about getting people to stop using email to collaborate because it’s not a very effective tool for that purpose – but recently this has changed to a recognition that people aren’t just going to simply drop email and move to something else; email needs to be part of that new solution.

The big name driver in this space is again Google, firstly with Google Wave and its attempt to create a new communications environment which takes the best bits of email, instant messaging etc and pulls them together. However, things like social networking also have an effect here – and again Google is a major driver of this through Buzz’s Gmail integration.

Through this Debate CIO hopes to discover what the CIO’s position is on hosted or web-based mail, and whether they see this evolution of email into part of a more integrated collaboration environment as being a valuable answer in the short or medium (or even long) term.

Response Summary

What is the future for email?

Email remains a core technology in many organisations, yet every new social media technology is said to be its replacement. This CIO Debate will discuss through a series of articles whether it is time to reassess email as a technology, the infrastructure behind it and what role email plays in our organisations and whether it is time to consider other technologies?

What are your views?

We’d like to hear from CIOs that have interesting views on email.

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