Smaller businesses can save significant amounts of money by replacing a "premises-based" e-mail system with a cloud based alternative, say researchers at the Yankee Group. Analyst Jeffrey Breen says a 75-person firm moving from premises-based e-mail and messaging to a cloud-based platform can save $64,000 in the first year and $207,000 within three years.

 

And best of all, the upfront migration and implementation costs of making the move are less than $6,000, Breen says.

 

In making its analysis, Breen compared Yankee Group’s own legacy email and messaging environment, based on Lotus Notes, to the Google (News - Alert) Apps "Premier Edition."

 

An SMB with a five-year history with Lotus Notes will generally have two to three mission-critical, custom-built applications that need to be replaced or migrated to another platform as part of any replacement effort, says Breen.

 

"For our test SMB, we considered a custom vacation-tracking HR application and an IT help desk ticketing and management system," he says. The rest of the e-mail and messaging environment includes anti-spam and anti-virus services already in the cloud, thanks to Postini, server-based anti-virus by McAfee, RIM’s BlackBerry Enterprise Server and e-mail backup with ArcServe (Computer Associates (News - Alert)).

 

"We decided to move our test SMB to Google Apps Premier Edition, which for $50 per year, per user," he says. The move would eliminate the need to maintain a BlackBerry (News - Alert) Enterprise Server. Google Sync, also free, would handle the synchronization of contacts and calendars. As a bonus, it supports many other devices in addition to RIM’s, including Apple’s iPhone and phones running Java, Android, Windows Mobile, Symbian (News - Alert) and others. We included appropriate setup costs as an internal IT expense.

 

Adding it all up, the one-year cost of running a premises solution for 75 people is $76,500 while the cost of using Google Apps Premier Edition is $12,972.