Microsoft Wants to be Your Cloud Provider
Which online email service provider is adding ten thousand servers to their data centers every month to keep up with demand? Would you believe it’s Microsoft? That’s one of the tidbits of info to come out of an interview Reuters conducted with Office VP Chris Capossela, looking at the future of the company’s hosted services. These include Exchange Online: the service that lets you keep your email on Exchange while delegating server management hassles back to Microsoft.
Capossela says Microsoft has an advantage over pure-cloud companies by offering a choice of hosted or licensed servers. But the company is seeing a move in the direction of hosted: he predicts 50% of all Exchange mailboxes will be in the hosted version in five years. There’s a certain attraction to this notion: why spend time trying to configure open source software or GMail extensions to make it act like Exchange, when you can just buy Exchange instead? Still, this plan seems more likely to take hold in the corporate world as a replacement to existing servers than to make headway among small-scale web workers.
Why spend money trying to configure Exchange to make it act like cloud Gmail, when you can just get free Gmail instead?
10,000 servers per month? I’d like to see how many connections they are serving per computer because that much hardware sounds extremely slovenly. Maybe more people are using hotmail than it seems?
I’ve used several hosted exchange services (still trying to find the perfect one). They’re great if you have a Windows Mobile 5/6 phone and a data plan.
Don’t really see any reason to go directly to MS… Checked their plans and they don’t see to be offering any type of cost/benefit over what’s already available.
Kevin
Luke: have you looked at 123together for Hosted Exchange (http://www.123together.com)?