Exchange IS the Control-Point

Mary Foley kindly breaks the news...

In her post, "Open source e-mail systems biggest threat to MS Exchange," Mary says...

Yankee will publish in April its "2007 Global Server Hardware and Server OS Survey." The survey of nearly 1,000 IT managers and C-level executives includes some "ominous" news for Microsoft, according to a copy of the executive summary of the study that I had a chance to see this week.

"In an ominous portent for Microsoft, 23% of the survey respondents indicated they intend to migrate away from Exchange Server and switch to an alternative Linux or open source Email and messaging distribution platform over the next 12 to 18 months. The users attributed their decision to their belief that Linux Email and messaging packages are cheaper and easier to manage than Exchange," according to study author and Yankee analyst Laura DiDio.

The reason given is management. That's not a reason; Exchange is easy to manage, that's one of its strong suits. The unspoken reason is to get away from Microsoft's lock-in on business processes routing via e-mail to and from the desktop. (And we've been hammering on this for years.)

This is good news for Zimbra, and Google Enterprise.

It implies CIOs are taking deliberate measures to escape Microsoft. A success-oriented ODF migration depends upon the replacement of MS Exchange.