We posted a feature today discussing the launch of Concentric Hosting’s new Perimeter Email Protection service, for which I had the opportunity to speak with Nate Gilmore, the company’s director of marketing.
The interview, as is sometimes the case, included some interesting material for which there was unfortunately not room in the feature. And as is also sometimes the case, the blog seems like the perfect place to give the discussion a little extra breathing room.
Outside of the here’s-a-new-product angle, PEP’s launch was notable for a sort of philosophical departure from a lot of the material with which we tend to be presented.
The hosting industry in general is right now very consistent in extolling the virtues of the software as a service model, particularly in the case of hosted email. And rightly so, I think, though possibly to the exclusion of much in-depth discussion of the interests of those many, many businesses that would like to get a few more miles out of their on-premise messaging solutions.
Concentric, like any good service provider with a vested interest in the future of email, agrees that the long-term destiny of messaging is SaaS. But Gilmore points out that the revolution may not be complete just yet:
“Long term, you’re going to see more and more businesses move to hosted messaging solutions. Especially newer businesses that don’t already have an existing investment. But there are a lot of older businesses out there, and mail servers are selling pretty quickly. There are a lot of mail server software companies out there that are still experiencing good growth. There is still a section of customers that will always want to hug that mail server on-premise, and will want to continue to have their workflow and mail server flow handled on premise. And there is a whole industry if ISVs and CSVs and IT professionals that service that industry.”
The point, perhaps, is that in the industry’s efforts to appear forward-thinking, we may be overlooking opportunities to bring new technology to old-fashioned arrangements of services.
What’s more, you may be passing on opportunities to establish relationships with those for-now holdouts who might eventually become valuable customers of SaaS-model services.
Gilmore says Concentric’s road map certainly leads from the PEP solution to the hosted Groupware product the company currently has in beta.
“We also have a product that we’re not including with this release because it’s still in beta and it only has a small number of customers. It’s not ready for primetime like PEP. And that’s our Groupware product. So when they’re ready to completely offload their email solution, we’re hoping they’ll still trust us because we did well with their perimeter email protection.”
