E-mail outsourcing frees up IT pros for core business initiatives - Industry Trend or Event

Communications News, May, 2000 by Scott Chasin

Messaging service providers offer advantages to all types of organizations.

Outsourcing long has been the standard for mission-critical services like telephone, utilities, and Internet access; e-mail is now gaining a stronghold. Until recently, company e-mail systems were strictly a do-it-yourself proposition. At most organizations, the daily exchange of billions of e-mails, voice mails, and faxes was thought to be too close to the corporate backbone to excise and entrust to third parties. The risks were simply too great; sensitive company communications could leak out, get lost, or worse yet, cease to function.

Adoption of the Internet as a corporate communications tool--along with the emergence of Web-based messaging technologies and standards that allow for secure intra-company communications--bolsters the case for turning over messaging systems to third-party specialists.

THE ROOTS OF E-MESSAGING

Electronic messaging has its roots in the early days of the ARPANET, later known as the Internet. In the late 1960s, researchers developed a way to send short, static, text-based messages among users of the same local area network (LAN). Not until the early 1980s, when so-called "time-share messaging" services, such as MCIMail, EasyLink, and Tele-mail were introduced, could e-mail link wide-area users; but these systems were proprietary, required special software, and involved user interfaces that were anything but user-friendly.

The next evolution of electronic messaging came a few years later with the emergence of proprietary closed e-mail solutions, like Microsoft Mail and Lotus cc:mail. A newer generation of groupware applications, like Lotus Notes and MS Exchange, soon developed, which added functionality and evolved to support Internet standards. Using these applications, colleagues in far-flung locations could send e-mail and also share information, such as files, documents, and calendars, not accessible by others without the same software and access privileges.

The fledgling Internet began to adopt messaging standards that allowed communications among proprietary networks. Standards, such as simple mail transport protocol (SMTP), post office protocol (POP) and Internet message access protocol (IMAP), were created and incorporated into the Internet, as well as integrated into other messaging platforms based on client-server technology. With the foundation laid for open, unfettered, internetwork messaging, the creation of the World Wide Web and the rapid spread of the Internet in the mid-1990s positioned electronic messaging as a central business and personal communications tool.

THE IP CONVERGENCE

An ongoing convergence around Internet protocol (IP) networking promises to broaden the definition of what kind of information can be carried in an electronic message. Voice and data technologies are evolving toward a common platform that leverages those IP underpinnings.

Two key arenas for this convergence are telephony and messaging platforms. Telecommunications carriers are beginning to migrate their voice telephone traffic, traditionally carried on circuit-switched networks--like the public switched telephone network (PSTN)--to the same IP networks that handle their data traffic. This more efficient merging of voice and data traffic means that newly developed applications will make no distinction between types of traffic. Internet messages will increasingly carry text, voice, and multimedia content.

A similar convergence is happening across messaging platforms. Faxes, pages, voice mail, and e-mail are traditionally handled by separate messaging systems. Emerging standards will soon allow these platforms to merge and offer true interoperability.

For example, the new voice profile for Internet mail (VPIM) and the fax profile for Internet mail (FPIM) standards enable SMTP-based e-mail to transport voice mail and faxes. In such an IP environment, a voice mail message becomes an audio attachment to an e-mail, and a fax becomes merely an image attachment to an e-mail.

Not only is content changing, devices that generate the messages are changing. Marketers of wireless phones, personal digital assistants (PDAs), pagers, and television set-top boxes are already integrating Web-based mail clients into their products. Messages thus will emanate not only from PCs but also from any number of communications devices available in the office, at home, and on the road.

THE MOVE TO OUTSOURCING

For the IT professionals who manage their companies' messaging systems, the implications of convergence are clear. With significantly more messages to handle, as well as their increasing multimedia nature, more bandwidth, more storage capacity, and more scalable support systems are required. Maintaining an in-house messaging system will be more costly in terms of both money and effort.

Corporate IT staffs feel the pinch. National estimates of IT job vacancies are as high as 400,000 (Sm@rt Reseller, September 1999). With the rapid development of new technologies, companies with in-house e-mail systems can count on expensive equipment upgrades and replacements every three to five years.