When you’re running a busy IT department, developing, customizing and managing mission-critical applications, the last thing you want is your IT staff solving problems with the corporate messaging platform.
Obviously messaging’s important but there’s no mistaking it’s a commodity. It needs to be available, but it doesn’t differentiate your company from competitors or give it a specific competitive advantage. In fact, unlike core corporate systems, it’s likely to one of a limited number of products on the market like Microsoft Exchange, Lotus Notes or Oracle Collaboration Suite.
Managing messaging systems seem to be particularly hard on in-house IT departments when companies grow rapidly, operate in many locations, or are involved in highly regulated industries with particularly stringent archiving and other requirements.
Such was the case at HOK, a St. Louis, MO.-based architectural firm, said CIO Ken Young.
“We had about 1300 mailboxes in 23 locations around the world, and our Exchange messaging platform was made up of 17 Exchange servers,” he said “We decided we wanted to consolidate and upgrade, and add Outlook web access. The benefits to us of outsourcing to USA.net were speed and cost. Messaging is not our field of expertise, and now I have the pleasure of knowing that messaging is not my problem any more.”