E-mail outsourcing has risen in promi-nence during the past year. Much has been written and discussed concerning e-mail outsourcing and what it can do for an organization.
Why has e-mail outsourcing suddenly become such a hot topic? E-mail has moved from a casual utility to mission-critical status. E-mail systems have become more complex, with gateways, integrated applications and distributed and remote users.
Retaining personnel in a tight labor market has proven increasingly difficult. Traditionally, entry-level people are assigned to positions of responsibility over the e-mail system. Once they become trained and proficient, they are immediately employable at higher salaries and often move on to become the administrator for another company that has the money to invest in a trained, experienced person.
These factors, combined with the increasing complexity and mission importance of e-mail and a shortage of skilled labor, have caused companies to look outside their borders for specialty companies that can provide the necessary services to maintain an e-mail system. Outsourcing has many different forms— everything from the full-blown, army-of-engineers, on-site approach designed to handle tens of thousands of users to the local Internet Service Provider (ISP) run-ning simple dial-up accounts.
The full-blown approach is taken by a wide variety of companies, including Con-trol Data, EDS and Compaq/Digital.
But the full-blown approach by these larger companies is often not feasible for many companies. With only a few hundred or a couple of thousand employees, their systems are small and require limited outsourcing.
Many small-to-medium-sized organizations often turn instead to specialty outsourcers that use the Internet to bring needed resources to bear without the high cost.
Over the past few years, specialty e-mail outsourcing companies have developed that offer focused outsourcing. These companies have been classified as messaging service providers (MSP), midsourcing companies, boundary services companies, application service providers (ASP), e-mail hosting companies or managed messaging companies. They all do similar things, though ASPs usually offer a wide variety of other services that might not be involved with the messaging infrastructure.
What does an e-mail outsourcing com-pany do and how does it operate?
An e-mail outsourcing company can offer myriad levels of service, from taking over a piece of a company’s e-mail system to controlling the entire setup. The process of outsourcing is not an all-or-nothing proposition.
Being faced with an all-or-nothing solution of outsourcing is often not feasible for e-mail administrators who must work with the infrastructure in place. Telling an administrator to pull out all of the infrastructure that has been built up over the years is not an easy sell. A phased approach is easier and more manageable.
Thousands of companies have taken an incremental path toward outsourcing, allowing them to off-load the high-maintenance or high-cost pieces of their e-mail infrastructure that they do not want to support or cannot support properly because of expertise.
In the past, this approach has included the gateway portion of the e-mail system; the SMTP gateway that connects and trans-lates the mail from the proprietary LAN e-mail system, such as Microsoft Exchange, Novell GroupWise or Lotus Notes, to the open Internet standard of SMTP.
Economies of scale allow an outsourcing company to manage these services off-site at a fraction of the cost, usually for a dollar or less a month per user.
The growth of the Internet and the increase in bandwidth has made this process continually less expensive. Several companies have focused on this area, such as Electric Mail, Allegro and Lansoft.
By off-loading one small piece to an out-side entity, the company can greatly diminish the logistics of maintaining the remaining mail system. An administrator can now focus on internal mail issues and not worry about the external hardware or software needed to connect to the outside world.
The boundary piece of the e-mail system deals with Internet users, remote users and distributed users, users that often require the highest amount of support and attention. American Home Products’ Wyeth-Ayerst subsidiary has done just that. The company has outsourced the support and maintenance of 3,000 outside salespeople using remote mail to a third party.
The outsourcing provider is able to build an infrastructure that uses economies of scale to house and maintain the necessary equipment to allow daily communication to pass from the field to the corporate office and vice versa. By maintaining the modems, servers and software, the specialist handles almost all of the day-to-day activities.
There are a couple of points to consider when deciding on an outsourcing company:

• technical expertise
  
• reputation
  
• business understanding
  
• communication access.

Technical expertise involves several aspects. Understanding your current e-mail platform is of obvious importance, but it is also necessary that the vender have good background in competing e-mail platforms as well.
The shifting nature of the industry is creating the need for companies to merge, partner and communicate with other e-mail platforms. If your outsourcing vendor does not understand the e-mail industry as a whole, then you might find yourself looking for another vendor half way through your outsourcing project.
Reputation is important. Your vendor should have a solid reputation with scala-bility and diversity and for providing solutions to problems instead of forcing canned solutions onto the client.
With reputation, big is not necessarily better. Occasionally, when dealing with big outsourcing vendors, the following sce-nario occurs:

Outsourcer: Hi. We are the biggest computer company in the world, and we are here to outsource your entire e-mail system. Our technical expertise on our e-mail system is unmatched. We will take care of you.

Customer: Great! But I’m not using your e-mail system. I’m running the e-mail system from your competitor.

Outsourcer: That’s okay. Our technical team consists of the leading experts in migrating compa-nies off of our competing products and onto our e-mail platform. They will be able to do this process easily.

Customer: But I don’t want to migrate. I want to continue to use the system I have.

Outsourcer: No you don’t. Let us bring in our marketing people and tell you why you shouldn’t do that.

This scenario is an example of the out-sourcer having a one-size-fits-all approach to e-mail outsourcing.
Business understanding is key because an outsourcer needs to understand your business to leverage the full potential of the technology.
For example, if your business has travel-ing users that need access to their mail but don’t have strong technical backgrounds, the e-mail outsourcing solution should reflect those conditions. Or if you have mul-tiple sites that have differing needs, then that criteria also needs to be addressed.
California-based St. Joseph Health Sys-tem has used outsourcing to offload much of its mail connectivity to the Internet. The organization’s e-mail business has been growing and expanding. The healthcare provider was able to turn to its out-sourcing company to address new ways to communicate securely between hospitals, as well as new ways of handling remote users and distributed offices.
Communication access to your outsourcing company is also key to success. Online reporting tools, 24-hour support, Web or dial-in access for administrators all allow the relationship between outsourcer and client to work smoothly. Understanding what is covered in a service level agreement (SLA), knowing who to call when there is a prob-lem and managing the expectations of what extremes the outsourcer will go to resolve issues in a timely fashion are all part of the communication process.
Having access to the outsourcer during the planning stages is also extremely helpful. Mercedes-Benz of North America used an outsourcer to provide certain levels of e-mail connectivity. When the company began to plan the expansion of its e-mail system, officials were able to bring in an outsourcing company that then provided additional solutions for tying together their disparate dealerships around the country.
By having strong communications between outsourcer and client, additional solutions were able to be put forth in the beginning stages of the project.
The company should be a part of your planning as well. It should be able to offer advice on growth and configuration strategies. In this case, a comprehensive plan was able to be put together that not only met the internal needs but also addressed the dealerships at a minimal cost.
What permutations can outsourcing take? Remote user management is a very natural place to start for outsourcing.
The outsourcing company maintains the necessary equipment to provide remote connectivity. This link has traditionally been made via a modem bank that the out-sourcing company maintains.
An extension of the customer’s mail system is maintained at the outsourcer’s site. Remote users are able to dial into the central site, connect to the outsourcer’s servers and establish a remote session.
The outsourcer ensures that the modems are maintained, sufficient lines are coming in and that remote requests are processed properly.
With larger amounts of bandwidth, it is also becoming possible for the outsourcer to provide the additional means of remote mail access. These options include Web mail and a client/server mode.
Client/server mode means that a remote user creates an Internet connection with a laptop or desktop computer—or other e-mail-enabled device. Once the link is made, though not necessarily to the out-sourcer, the e-mail client software, i.e. Outlook, is launched.
The e-mail client is able to make a connection across the Internet to the out-sourcer’s site. This IP connection is created just as if the end user were sitting at his or her desk accessing e-mail locally. The remote client establishes an IP connection and begins processing the mail normally for the end users.
This method means that local calls into a local ISP can be made instead of a central hub of modem banks. This method is very easy for the out-sourcer to provide and is much more cost effective. It reduces large phone connections for long-distance dial-up. It is also faster.
The other method that is now available is the web mail reader. This setup uses a web interface to allow the end user to use any browser anywhere to gain access to a corporate mailbox.
The big three name brand software e-mail vendors, Notes, Exchange and GroupWise, all have a web reader that allows browsers to act as the interface for the e-mail system.
This solution is by far the lowest cost because there is not any client software to maintain or support. Because it is Web-based, it also means that the mail is not limited to a single machine or proprietary e-mail client software.
Web mail interfaces are becoming important to corporate customers because it is easy to support and maintain.
If a company decides it wants to out-source the entire e-mail system, cost is one of the deciding factors. A study by Creative Networks Inc. (CNI) has shown that com-panies who outsource enjoy substantial savings.
In an analysis of an organization with 5,000 users, the report revealed that overall costs—including administration and man-agement, productivity and revenue losses due to downtime—were reduced by more than 45 percent. The savings were even better with a larger group. In its study, CNI found a 12,000-employee firm could trim nearly 50 percent from its e-mail expenses.
Full off-site outsourcing has become eas-ier because of the increased availability of Internet bandwidth.
Companies can now decide to outsource their current proprietary LAN e-mail, such as Exchange or Groupwise or instead move to an open standard mail client like POP3 or IMAP4. Many companies are entertaining the idea of only running client software onsite, such as Outlook and outsourcing the message store offsite. This is the identical scenario as the remote users—except the entire system is outsourced.
Whether your e-mail system supports 10 users or 10,000 users, e-mail outsourcing has developed into a viable option. E-mail outsourcing is not an all-for-nothing proposition and can save your organization money, time, and resources. It permits off-loading mission-critical mail to a specialist, so you can focus on running your business.