A major company a friend of mine works for dumps MS Exchange fo gmail.
 

I have a good friend that works in the training and tech support area for a major international engineering firm. They have offices all over the world and a pretty big infrastructure. His boss was told that he needed to cut around 10 million from that department's budget. He didn't want to lay anyone off because he needed them all so he looked into some things. He saw that the company's license for MS Exchange was coming up for renewal and it would cost around 8.5 million. They decided to dump it and go with individual gmail accounts for everyone.

To me it was pretty interesting that a big company would trust sometimes sensitive business communications to a free online email service. They also are upgrading computers and are going away from MS Office and to Open Office.

I wonder if this will start to be trend more companies will follow.

He should have just gone with Google Apps instead of having people using random @gmail accounts :P

People that wants to be smart... hahaha

Actually I think they are the trend followers not the setters...I have been seeing this move to Gmail on a small biz scale for the last 18 months or so.
I have been off domain based email and using Gmail exclusively for at least that long as well.

I rarely use office suite apps but when I do I use Open Office..there just isn't any reason to use MS office anymore and the cost savings is a no brainer no matter what scale of biz you operate.

Tell your firend that his IT-department completely missed the point of Exchange if they think gmail can replace it. What a bunch of morons. If your exchange install arent making your company money, you are doing it wrong

all this electricity - lets get rid of that, those dam lights in the ceiling are blinding me anyways....

And I dont belive that "8.5 million" figure.

I use Microsoft products at all times because my cousin works for MSFT and gets me software at really discounted prices (Vista Ultimate or Office 2007 for 60 bucks and that includes shipping).
If I didn't have him working there, I would find a way around it such as using Linux or Thunderbird for my email product instead of Outlook.
What I don't understand is why the company didn't go with a Open Source email server and use Thunderbird as the client ?

ebus dork is correct.

Many companies spend much more than that on Exchange licenses. However if they're spending that much on Exchange, I would more suspect they're migrating to Google Apps mail. I've done it for small businesses and it's a pain to migrate everything.

The biggest problem will be maintaining security of business confidential information.

No real company does that, gotta love idiots running things.

They spend that much when they upgrade to a new version and have to buy new CAL's for the clients and terminal users, but they don't spend that amount of money on a Exchange Server license - period

And if you want me to prove it, have your friend send me the exact figures and I will make him a offer that is miles from those figures ([email protected])

Microsoft based IT-Infrastructure is my main business, and I have done it since 1994. I'm a certified MS partner and I can legally sell him the Licenses even if he isn't located in my region.

If he is short on cash, he can even lease it directly from MS

I don't work there. I am just going off of what he told me and that number is what is boss told him.

My friend doesn't own the company, he is just an employee. Like any company there are people involved in it that don't seem too bright. I won't pretend to even act like I know anything about exchange and how to make money with it.

They may end up going that way. I had dinner with him the other night and he was telling us that this was just starting to happen so I'm not sure what they will ultimately end up using.

Well, they are a company that has offices all over the world as well as in several states in the US. They have around 55,000 employees world wide. I don't pretend to be an expert, but I would consider that a real company and they are doing this. I guess we will see how it turns out.

they might be on a molp plan and not on a standard exchange liciencing plan.

it was a real stinker of a program, but it did allow you to buy licience dirt cheap
keep upgraded with the most current version for like 2 years

however if they were on such a plan, they would be paying like 150 /server
3/CAL so the 8.5 million seems really high.

i can see that working.

can't they just time-shift the exchange licenses?

I have to agree with some other posters here... Personally I'm not an Exchange fan, but what it does - isn't really e-mail.

For basic e-mail services - google apps sounds great. Hell, I'd rather pay google to do our e-mail hosting than do it ourselves, it's such a pita and constant time sink due to spam/etc.

But Exchange does quite a bit more than e-mail. That is where it's value comes into play.

So far, I haven't seen anything come even close to being able to replace Exchange wholesale. When that product finally does come out, it will certainly be interesting.

Lot of big companys use gmail

Microsoft Exchange is not just for email. Since Exchange 2003, it has been more of a collaboration platform and Exchange 2007, when deployed properly and when users are trained appropriately, delivers far more value then what can be quantified by sending and receiving messages.

If this decision was made solely on the need for a mail platform, then whatever, but to spend that much on MS licensing and not even be using it for a fraction of what it is meant to deliver? Shame on the CIO, shame on their LAR and shame on their Microsoft Certified Partner.

I hope he read gmail's terms of service.

:thumbsup

It still beneficial to use good free services.

GMAIL can host your own domain's e-mail addresses too. So you can have e-mails like [email protected] but using GMAIL to access the e-mail.

I use GMAIL for my personal e-mail and for my corporate e-mails. It is much better than exchange. And all of the e-mails download to my blackberry.

GMAIL has e-mail, instant messaging, calendar, search, smtp, pop, and you can access it on a mobile device. And it is only $50/year (per user).

I was going to say that GMAIL doesn't have message backups/archiving that you can do with exchange, but I realized that it does; it has postini.

Some of you are saying that exchange is much better but you haven't given any actual reasons.

And if you are hosting exchange on your own servers then you have to pay people to maintain those servers and pay for a datacenter.

And if you don't have redundant servers and/or are using an older version of exchange, then you have to back-up your e-mail onto tapes every day.

And right now, a lot of employees can't access their e-mail from home because their employer disabled web access, so they are forwarding their work to a GMAIL account or to their home e-mail. This has security risks, so it is better if you are already using GMAIL then it won't be an issue.

how much a debian license costs with exim4?

how much a sysop costs to set up a fail tolerant enviroment with 20-30k mailbox on enterprise grade hardware just using open source software?

that's just stupid... surely there's other, in-house, free, email solutions they could use if they needed to save money so bad.. putting your company's secrets and reliance into a third party like that is flimsy business if you ask me.

I wasn't suggesting Exchange is better- our company uses Gmail and Google apps as well as Microsoft Front Office applications. It really depends on a number of factors like reliance on technology for your business processes, availability of in-house IT to manage your infrastructure, how savvy are your users, what kind of hardware do you have to use at the desktop and back end- all of these TCO considerations would go into deciding what works best for each company.

It just seems odd that an international corporation would pull a licensed application backed by a Vendor and an IT channel to replace it with freeware. I don't have all the information so I can't say its stupid- just odd, thats all.

I use Gmail for everything. I can access Gmail from any computer in the world, and from there I can use it's live chat feature. I also use it's calendar to track what updates are done on my blog network ( I do them all in advance ) and I use their documents to store my most important documents. I also use Gmail to pull all of my other email.

It's sweet.

Why would someone pay to use software to do this? I could understand doing that five years ago, but not today.

switched from thunderbird to gmail for my domain email and it works fantastic with all the google apps in one place. One step closer to a browser based OS.

I think it depends on your business. Some businesses need to adhere to strict rules regarding archiving and access to email and attachments for instance (PIPEDA in Canada, Sarbanes Oxley in the US, the healthcare industry, Finance, etc.). Spending money on software is not a waste if it delivers ROI. I am not aware of all the features and fucntionality (or even if it exists) in Gmail and Google aps with respect to any ability to adhere to some of these guidelines for instance. We use Gmail ourselves so its not like I'm against it or anything. we also use the calendars, Google aps and sites, although I much prefer Microsoft Groove to Google sites.