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.
Another interesting option coming soon is the Chandler (PIM) and Cosmo (WebDav server) currently being developed by Mitch Kapor's Open Source Applications Foundation: http://chandler.osafoundation.org/
With many years of thought behind this, it will introduce some changes to the email and PIM paradigm that just might "revolutionize" the business...
Posted by: Benjamin | March 23, 2007 at 04:14 PM
Where I work, I talked myself blue in the face trying to convince the IS manager of the same thing as regards our database system (migrating to Microsoft stack, top to bottom). To no avail. The only high point of the situation? I'm still here and he isn't. I think that's progress.
Smiles.
Posted by: Hans | March 23, 2007 at 04:37 PM
That isn't news. Tom Adelstein in one of his LXer articles said much the same thing, and he said it several years before Mary Jo Foley realized it.
Unfortunately, his software wasn't taken up - I've got a copy of it sitting somewhere on my HD - but it's good to see that companies are finally waking up to the strategic importance of the communications channels.
Posted by: Wesley Parish | March 24, 2007 at 05:31 AM