April 19, 2009 By Hilton Collins
Plagued by razor-thin budgets, government IT leaders can't always procure the best technology for providing citizens with 21st-century service delivery. To save money, more agency managers are paying vendors to provide hosted solutions, saving agencies from buying multiple product licenses and the requisite machinery.
This is a growing trend, at least when it comes to hosted e-mail -- in which clients' e-mail exchange technology is housed on vendor servers instead of their own.
The Radicati Group, a market research company, confirmed its rising popularity in an August 2008 report that found there were nearly 1.6 billion worldwide users of hosted e-mail -- between both consumer and business e-mail. The report estimates that there will be 2.2 billion users by 2012, which is a 9 percent annual average growth rate.
"A Web-hosting company literally is the entity that manages most of the daily aspects of your Web site or Web sites. The same is true with e-mail," said James Driscoll, former senior sales representative for LuxSci, an e-mail hosting company. "An e-mail hosting company takes responsibility for the provisioning of your account initially and the management and maintenance of your account on an ongoing basis, so that all you have to do is come into your office in the morning, turn your computer on and up comes an e-mail program."
And even when a host manages the hardware, software and applications associated with an agency's e-mail, users typically see no difference when using a standard front-end tool, like Microsoft Outlook.
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