Hosted Services and Exchange

Executive Summary:

Are you ready to move to the software as a service model to administer portions of Exchange? Explore the offerings in the Exchange Hosted Services portfolio: hosted filtering, hosted continuity, hosted archive and hosted encryption. And review the licensing plan to see if its simplicity suits your needs.

The Software as a Service (SaaS) business model (also known as the software and services or S+S) appears to be gaining popularity in the marketplace, with SaaS offerings (called hosted services) spreading to a variety of organizations. The Cutter Consortium, an IT analysis firm, released a study in January 2007 claiming that 74 percent of their participants were either using or seriously evaluating SaaS. Of course, we’ve had email SaaS for a long while—think of the old days of CompuServe, AOL, and Prodigy. More recently, vendors large and small have started offering SaaS versions of conventional applications such as customer relationship management (CRM), sales force automation, enterprise resource planning, and other mainstays of the data center. Messaging services have been a big part of this trend; a number of vendors have offered hosted Exchange mailboxes for several years, and vendors of other messaging-related services—including antispam, antivirus, archiving, and encryption—are in the SaaS market, as well. . . .