What would it take to get your boss to move to office 365?
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My company is considering paying an outside consultant they've used for years to upgrade their Exchange server. I will need to learn more about 365 before challenging such a proposal.
Long story for company politics, but I am still new to the grand scheme of things with this company. Price is everything and functionality is secondary. Oh and they are scared of the word cloud as this consultant seems to be overly cautious in any sort of cloud-based service/program. He even advised against using Teamviewer/LogMeIn to create support sessions on rare occasions.
Good news is they don't make decisions quickly at all so I should have time to learn the necessary information and advise appropriately. Any elementary quick breakdowns for me? I appreciate it.
What would it take my boss? A hell of a speech and a price sheet to back it up. He glazes over 30 seconds into explaining the improvements of anything from my experience.
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Easy sell:
- save money
- better security
- more features
- forward looking rather than backwards looking
- less risk should the company shrink
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@scottalanmiller said:
Easy sell:
- save money
I want to agree with this, but Exchange no longer exists in a single server vacuum. If the customer already has a DC, and a VM host to run it on, where's the savings? True, it's not SAS70 compliant, but SMBs don't need that kind of uptime normally.
Now, if you have a catastrophic failure and need to bring in outside help to solve it and you're email is down for days, OK sure, you might be able to get the price to be more expensive than O365, but how often does that really happen?
I'll give you all the other points, but saving money isn't one I've seen be the case.
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@Dashrender said:
@scottalanmiller said:
Easy sell:
- save money
I want to agree with this, but Exchange no longer exists in a single server vacuum. If the customer already has a DC, and a VM host to run it on, where's the savings? True, it's not SAS70 compliant, but SMBs don't need that kind of uptime normally.
Now, if you have a catastrophic failure and need to bring in outside help to solve it and you're email is down for days, OK sure, you might be able to get the price to be more expensive than O365, but how often does that really happen?
I'll give you all the other points, but saving money isn't one I've seen be the case.
If you run the numbers, the things that you mention were never driving costs. It is labor, mailbagging, AV, licensing, backup, storage, etc. that cost the most. You have to be ridiculously risky to make Exchange in house as cheap as Hosted Exchange.
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I know of no shop with business class email beating $4/user/month. They often hide the cost on other budgets but it is there. SMBs don't do good financial analysis and often don't see where there money is going.
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Do you have a break down that you've done for another SMB that you can share (no names of course).
Something like (these numbers were simply pulled from my head)
Exchange server license $12,000
SA renewal at 3 years $3,000
Exchange CAL $56/user
SA renewal at 3 years $12/user
Server cost per year assuming 5 year replacement $2000
Initial Install cost $3000
IT support cost of Exchange for 1 year $2500
Spam Filtering per year $12/user
Power and cooling per year $500
Assuming a 5 year time frame and total cost is ($12K + $3K + 100*$56 + 100*$12 + 5*$2K + $3K +5*$2500 +5100$12+ 5*$500) = $55,800 for 100 users
$55,800 over 5 years for 100 users breaks down to $9.30/user/monthAgain these numbers are all just plucked from the air.
If you have something like this that we could show management, I think it'd be pretty easy for them to move to O365.
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We used to have one from the preOffice 365 era that did this that would work but it got lost at some point
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OK weird problem with my post. In the line where i add all the numbers up it's missing several stars (shift
between the 100 and the dollar amount. When I edit the post, they appear, but they don't when I'm just looking at the thread. -
Stars are used in the markdown.
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@Minion-Queen said:
It was more the what would you need to see to get your boss to migrate.
Exchange failure. When it crashes and burns, they'll consider it.
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@Nara said:
@Minion-Queen said:
It was more the what would you need to see to get your boss to migrate.
Exchange failure. When it crashes and burns, they'll consider it.
One major on premise outage often does the trick. What surprises me is how often people get into a blacklisting situation and can't send mail to anyone and still don't realize that they look like they've gone out of business to their clients and it doesn't click in their minds that this would never have happened if they were on Office 365 (or Google Apps or Rackspace, etc.)
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@Dashrender said:
Do you have a break down that you've done for another SMB that you can share (no names of course).
I could do up an environment-specific one, based on requirements. What level of uptime are you looking for, how many users are there, and how much email is there? Can the existing staff handle a fault-tolerant Exchange environment?
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@scottalanmiller said:
One major on premise outage often does the trick. What surprises me is how often people get into a blacklisting situation and can't send mail to anyone and still don't realize that they look like they've gone out of business to their clients and it doesn't click in their minds that this would never have happened if they were on Office 365 (or Google Apps or Rackspace, etc.)
It wouldn't happen if they'd use any kind of external filtering for their e-mail. All our e-mail goes via GFI Mailmax. It costs less than $10 a year per user. Postini is even cheaper and does the same thing. I'd never contemplate sending e-mail direct.
I don't know what the risk of a complete crash and burn is. Other than some planned maintenance on a Sunday, we've had 100% uptime on our Exchange 2010 server over the last few years. It's a tough call to recommend going from 100% uptime to Office 365's 99.97% (that's around 8 hours of downtime over a 3 year period, which I think is pretty mediocre) on the grounds of reliability.
Sod's law now says my Exchange server will go down today!
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@scottalanmiller said:
Because SMBs desire these things and ask for them. Same as SBS. You can't blame a vendor for offering both a good and a bad product. If the market didn't demand the bad products they wouldn't sell. Microsoft doesn't push, recommend or require in any way that you avoid the E levels and they provide a partner ecosystem to ensure that you get good advice.
This isn't a true at all. If you look here http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/business/compare-all-office-365-for-business-plans-FX104051403.aspx you see that Microsoft are pretty explicit in what they recommend for small and mid-size business. For an SMB to go with an E plan, they would have to disregard everything Microsoft's website is telling them.
Consider the name. E is for Enterprise. If they were expecting SMBs to use this product, they should have called it something else.
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@scottalanmiller said:
SMBs don't do good financial analysis and often don't see where there money is going.
That's a sweeping statement. I think I do pretty well on the financial analysis. It's not easy because our IT infrastructure contains a lot of fixed costs and allocating those costs to onsite Exchange isn't easy. If we migrated to O365 we'd still be paying the same fixed costs to the likes of Microsoft, HP, Veeam and VMware to maintain our onsite infrastructure.
It's impossible to do a definitive comparison between onsite and hosted. There are simply too many variables. But I suspect Microsoft price everything so that there is very little difference in price either way. Onsite Exchange was, and is, such a big revenue earner for them, they're hardly going to have cannibalised their key product by significantly underpricing O365.
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@scottalanmiller said:
You have to be ridiculously risky to make Exchange in house as cheap as Hosted Exchange.
I'd be interested to know what you mean by "ridiculously risky" (and whether you think I'm being ridiculously risky).
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@Carnival-Boy said:
@scottalanmiller said:
You have to be ridiculously risky to make Exchange in house as cheap as Hosted Exchange.
I'd be interested to know what you mean by "ridiculously risky" (and whether you think I'm being ridiculously risky).
To keep the cost below $4 total, there is no way to afford things like a mailbagging service which is typical 50% of that service alone and replicating that feature internally would cost much more than a service. Without commercial mailbagging / smart hosting you have no real protection against blacklisting, email extortion or protracted outages. It's a rare business that can afford their email to fail to a point if people thinking that they are out of business.
Then you need storage, backups and other costs which, the smaller you are, the more expensive that they are on a per user basis.
The cost of running Exchange is just too high.
And the admin's time matters. That might seem free but it is not. Every minute you put in to worrying about Exchange is a minute you aren't doing something for your business that differentiates your business. Email is a commodity and can be offloaded. Business specific support is not and cannot be. Having things like Exchange in house diminishes the value if the IT staff.
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Rightly or wrongly, I don't spend any time worrying about Exchange. I spend more time logging onto Microsoft's portal to download my subscription invoices.
If I understand the definition of mailbagging, Postini does this for like $4 per YEAR. We use GFI, which is still dirt cheap, and I'd be tempted to continue using GFI with O365, as I like it's interface and granular spam control.
Another consideration is internet connectivity. We have a 10mb line for 60 office users. I'm not sure that would be enough for O365, given the extra internal e-mails that would be going through it. We tend to use e-mail too much internally, but I have a hard time persuading users to use other options. On the other hand, connectivity would improve for remote workers who complain that their connection to our server is too slow.
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Postini was the standard at $2 or more per month last I checked but as I understand it is now discontinuing service.
It is smart hosting, mail collection, spam filtering, AV filtering combined.
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Because hosted email removes the SMTP traffic and replaces it with mailbox management traffic the traffic patterns are very different. Can be higher or lower.
External users come 100% off of the network though. Not only do each of them get a better experience but they don't impact the internal users.
