Microsoft has announced the Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 is now available worldwide, and the software giant believes that despite the economy, forces are promoting significant customer adoption, in much the same way that they believe forces favor a higher-than normal commercial adoption of the new Windows 7 OS.
“We are seeing interest strong across all industries, with education perhaps higher than average,” said Tim Hickernell, Associate Lead Research Analyst, Info-Tech Research Group. “Most of the interest in larger systems like email upgrades are due to budget planning. We are seeing a tremendous increase in interest in Exchange upgrades.”
A key reason for this is that many customers are still using Exchange 2003. Hickernell said that about 75 percent of their clients are Exchange users, and of those, about 75 percent are still using Exchange 2003, having never upgraded to Exchange 2007 because Exchange 2003 was a popular, stable platform.
“2003 is a sunset technology now,” Hickernell said. ” IT is very reluctant to rock the boat, but even though 2003 has been strong, we believe our customers will have significant upgrades in the next 6-12 months. I expect movement within 2010 sometime because of interest in budgeting for email platform upgrades in 2010.”
Microsoft is touting the practical reasons to switch, saying Exchange Server 2010 customers are reporting cost savings of up to 70 percent, because of a simplified high-availability model and support for lower-cost storage.
“Exchange Server 2010 has a lot of new features in many different areas,” said Andy Papadopoulos, President, LegendCorp, a Toronto-based Microsoft Gold Certified partner. “Storage is still being purchased, even in a down economy, so putting some of that storage on less expensive devices is important, and this will save them money.”
Info-Tech’s Hickernell said the ability to use cheaper storage was tops on their’ clients lists of the new features.
“The greatest interest so far in Exchange is the option for far less expensive storage in the new architecture. Next is the archiving option. After that is performance and higher availability capabilities.”
The archiving and high availability features were important to one customer, the Phaeton Automotive Group
“We had been running last 2-3 years on Google Apps, and we switched because of the ease of management,” said Jonathan Pisarczyk, Information Systems Group Manager, Phaeton Automotive Group. “We liked Exchange 2010 because of the archiving and high availability. Those were our biggest problems before. We have 300 people on the system right now and it’s working flawlessly so far.”
George Hamin, eBusiness Manager, Subaru Canada, said that Subaru was already on Exchange 2007 so the argument for them to move to 2010 wasn’t as clear-cut as for those customers on Exchange 2003.
For us, the low cost beta disks and archiving were important,” Hamin said. “Another big thing is the clustering which let us turn our Montreal office into a high availability center. There’s lots in there from a cost savings point of view.”
The 2010 server’s efficiencies also encourage further cost savings in consolidation and virtualization, Papadopolous added.
“With Exchange Server 2010 we can handle 70 percent more users than on 2007, so it’s good for consolidation,” he said. “Putting a lot more users on servers also lets them think about consolidating their environment.”
“Clients want a reduction in third party bolt-ons to Exchange, which add cost and complexity, so the new features meet a need, Papadopoulos added. “The customer feedback is that moving parts must come down. They need to simplify their environment because they have less people to run things. And they want the same experience on mobile. They don’t want to deal with VPN any more.”
Another attractive feature is a universal inbox that delivers e-mail, voice mail, instant messaging and text messaging across virtually any device, and which Microsoft says delivers productivity gains of more than 20 percent.
“The unified messaging component is attractive because many clients have issues with voice mail capacity, and are looking to upgrade.” Papadopolous said. “With 2010, some are willing to give their voice mail to Exchange.
Subaru Canada’s Hamin also praised the stability of the new platform.
“From a stability point of view, this is one of the best Microsoft releases I’ve seen to date,” he said. “There was no need to wait for SP1, which IT managers typically wait for.”
Exchange Server 2010 and Forefront Protection 2010 for Exchange, which helps Exchange Server customers further safeguard business information and which was announced at the same time, are available now for trial at http://www.thenewefficiency.com/. The community technology preview for SQL Server 2008 R2 will be available for download at http://www.microsoft.com/sqlserver/2008/en/us/R2.aspx.