Switching away from Microsoft Exchange 2007

Mary Jo Foley writes about the 23% of C-level executives indicating their intention to drop Microsoft Exchange. The analyst that produced the report is quoted saying:

The users attributed their decision to their belief that Linux Email and messaging packages are cheaper and easier to manage than Exchange,” according to study author and Yankee analyst Laura DiDio.

There is a lot of truth and a lot of irrational exuberance in that very small paragraph.

First, its true that people find managing Exchange to be difficult. But what they find difficult to manage is usually not simply Microsoft Exchange, but the entire Microsoft platform – In my many presentations both to business owners and IT professionals I frequently talk about the importance of training.  Corporate america does not have a talent pool required to manage these incredibly complex environments. Likewise, its important to realize WHY this very problem exists in the first place:

Businesses rely on email today far more than they did 5 years ago or 10 years ago.

So when you put ten fold the workload on top of a mail system that was designed to handle small 5k email, and turn it into a fax server, voicemail server, PBX, mobility storage and management system, groupware solution… well, you have to understand that at that level of complexity you are dealing with far more than what those “competitive” solutions offer.

Please take it from me – I run Exchange, Postfix and Sendmail solutions. These corporate managers that “believe Linux messaging packages are cheaper and easier to manage” are simply buying the feedback from the blindfolded high school and college kids they have left to manage their corporate messaging platforms. They have highly underpaid and undertrained jr. system administrators in charge of an enterprise platform that may be constantly crashing and are taking the advice of a kid whose Postfix box at home “just works” in a default Ubuntu install. So when they ask “can we save money” and the Linux kid responds with “we can do it with Linux” what they are really saying is “we can replicate some of the very basic functionality for free, or some more functionality and save about 50% on licensing cost but will eventually quadruple that initial investment because the software to monitor, manage and scale those solutions just doesn’t exist” — good news is, we know Perl so we can do it!

So there you have it. Yet another “wave of change” scenario that dies when someone with the business and finance expertise which barely got them through the 11th grade goes to the CEO and tells them they have to give up their Blackberry or install the redirector software on their Windows desktop…. That CEO will turn into Charleton Heston clinching to his Blackberry: “From my cold dead hands.”