Last year, Forrester Research published a report by Ted Schadler called, “Tier Your Workforce To Save Money With Cloud-Based Corporate Email.” This chart in that report caught my attention:

These costs are based in a large firm of about 100,000 employees. Smaller firm will typically pay more per mailbox because of higher license fees and lower staffing efficiency.

Occasional users cost about 1/3 of “mobile executives” because of mobile messaging, storage and higher staff costs. In addition, archiving would add  about $4.50 to the monthly costs.

In a previous paper Ted laments:

It’s hard to figure out what email actually costs. We know because it took us months to track down all the costs. Even breaking out the email client software costs is difficult, particularly in an era of bundled pricing and maintenance costs for desktop licenses. And when you throw in complex server licenses, hardware managed by someone else far away, ever-accumulating storage, support services provided by other IT groups, and financial costs like deprecation and the cost of capital, it gets downright ugly.

I suspect that many organizations who take the effort to find their fully-loaded email costs will find them to be quite a bit higher that the char above.

For many organization moving to a cloud based email solution has the potential to save a lot of money. However, there are more benefits than just saving money:

• quickly and easily add new users
• have your IT team focus on IT challenges that are unique to your organization
• always being up-do-date
• use Operation Expenses (OpEx) budget rather than Capital Expense (CapEx) to pay-as-you-go

If you can use a web-based solution to provide lower-cost email and improve your business processes, then potential savings are huge. The improved agility can also have a major impact on your business.