For most small business owners, email is their lifeblood. In fact, in a Gartner and Symantec study, it was determined that up to 75% of a company’s intellectual property resides in its email and other messaging applications.  As a mission-critical part of your business, email simply has to work, be fast and always be accessible from the road or home. Today, this means being able to access your email and calendar directly from your cell phone, BlackBerry or other mobile device, so you’re never out of touch with your business.   But as critical as email is to most companies, it is important to remember that managing your email infrastructure (i.e., mail servers) is not usually directly related to the products or services you sell. To be successful, you have to focus on growing your bottom line, not on making sure your email is working, which can be both time consuming and expensive. 

 The good news is that a variety of hosted services are available for small businesses – services that were once only reserved for the biggest corporations.  Hosted services, also known as Software as a Service or SaaS, are software applications that you access through the Internet. Hosting vendors store the information on their own servers and manage the entire system for you, helping to drastically reduce the time and energy you spend on keeping your email up and running.  Primed for enormous growth and widespread adoption, Gartner Consulting predicts that SaaS is growing from just 5 percent of software revenues in 2005 to nearly a third of all software revenues by the end of the decade. 
When it comes to managing email, more and more businesses are turning to SaaS solutions for help.  For example, many organizations are opting to deploy Hosted Exchange 2007, a cost-effective alternative to managing an in-house email server.  However, not everyone has realized the benefits of a SaaS email solution, and it’s proving to be an expensive lesson.  Unfortunately, for most small and medium-sized businesses, the cost of running a Microsoft Exchange server in-house is simply too much.  This is why Hosted Exchange 2007 or Exchange outsourcing makes sense for smaller businesses.  This cost-effective solution means that a Managed IT Service Provider, like The Launch Pad,  provides all the technology and support of a Hosted Exchange Platform to businesses for a small monthly fee.    So, companies get all the benefits of an in-house Exchange Server without the hefty price tag or IT management headache.   All of the same tools are available but with a web-based user interface that doesn’t require a technical certification to use. 

Interested in Learning More?  Check out Part II: Into the Cloud – The Real Benefits of Hosted Exchange.  Is It the Right Move for Your Organization?