Cloud email's Australian thunderstorm

Renai LeMay
Thursday, 11 February 2010 23:19

Business IT - Technology

On 11 January this year, Macquarie University issued a statement that left Australia's IT industry in no doubt as to how the institution felt about its ageing in-house email systems.

'We were spending a significant amount of money each year maintaining our own inferior email infrastructure that, despite our best efforts, was falling further and further behind staff expectations,' said the university's vice chancellor Steven Schwartz. 'That's money we would much prefer to spend on better teaching and research facilities for our staff and students, or on scholarships enabling students from disadvantaged backgrounds to access a university education.'

The net result of that stark evaluation? Macquarie is currently in the process of dumping its in-house Novell GroupWise email infrastructure and moving 6,000 staff to Google's Gmail platform; a move that comes after the university already shifted some 68,000 students into Google's cloud.

Some may find such a switch dramatic and risky. After all, many questions abound about security, privacy and the degree to which cloud computing/vendor-hosted email platforms offer a sophisticated enough platform to be compared with a traditional email solution.

And yet, Macquarie's tale is a story that is becoming increasingly common in Australian organisations as many re-evaluate just what they want from an email platform, what they truly need or would settle for, and often most importantly, what they're prepared to pay.

Google's marketing spiel for its cloud computing platform exhorts organisations to dump their legacy infrastructure and 'Go Google' with the search giant's Apps suite '” Gmail, calendaring, messaging, an office suite, and web site creation and hosting.