10 red hot enterprise tech for SMB customers

It's incredible that we're already in the year 2010 and we still expect small businesses to manage PST files. Managing Outlook archives has never been an easy or enjoyable task for anybody.

And it's not getting any easier. Many businesses running Microsoft Outlook 2007 or older set one standard size of mailbox for all employees which frustrates power users.

And 450MB for a mailbox these days is embarrassingly inadequate given that accounts from free online email services are measured in gigabytes.

Companies of all sizes are moving to hosted email services. Demand is so hot for hosted email that one reseller, managing director Nick Beaugeard of HubOne, told CRN that his sales team is walking around picking up several-thousand seat BPOS accounts - in government as well as private business.

SMBs wanting to free themselves of email management are also keen and early adopters. Businesses can choose a hosted email provider or go directly to the leading vendors themselves.

Google and Microsoft have been waging a running battle for the email accounts of university students and are slowly turning to focus on business. Choosing the right platform depends on what a business is using and how it intends to use it in the future.

Microsoft Exchange Online is part of the abovementioned Business Productivity Online Suite. It offers 25GB storage and integrates with social media such as Facebook and Twitter.

Google's email platform, Gmail, also offers 25GB under its Premier Edition of Google Apps.

"If you're already a Microsoft site and you use a lot of the functionality in Exchange, then BPOS makes a lot more sense. On the other hand if you're an organisation that has just basic email, or if you're coming off Novell Groupwise, then Gmail might be attractive," says IBRS' Kevin McIsaac.

While Gmail may fall short on functionality and features, Google has made up for it by adding integration with its many other products including YouTube, Google Maps, and so on. And, importantly for SMBs, it has easier pricing.

"Gmail is a much simpler pricing strategy. Google Apps you get a single figure for everything they've got. Microsoft is still a very complicated licensing arrangement," McIsaac says.

Another email problem is bugging enterprises - archiving. Symantec's MessageLabs told CRN that email archiving is going to be its fastest growing market, driven by regulatory compliance.

Archived emails are tagged, copied, encrypted and replicated in its hosted data centre. Finding emails or information is just as important as storing them, says MessageLabs.

It will be interesting to see whether SMBs turn to vendors like MessageLabs to archive their on-premise email or go straight to the cloud with Google and Microsoft, which offer their own archiving services.

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