Microsoft® Exchange & Rackspace® Email Exchange Hybrid
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@Breffni-Potter said:
Rackspace Price is X, They don't set the pricing for Microsoft's offering, They set the price for their own RackSpace Exchange offering. Which is likely over-inflated to the moon.
Correct. They do not set the price. And the Microsoft price for Hosted Exchange is $4. That's where I am getting the price for O365. Microsoft sets it, not Rackspace. Rackspace quotes a different thing that isn't applicable to a discussion about email pricing to make O365 sound expensive in comparison.
Rackspace Exchange is $10, 250% higher than Office 365's pricing of Exchange.
Their "cost savings" calculator is misleading of O365 pricing, which is my point. RS does not get to set that price.
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Right, so what I'm saying is that the closest plan they are using on their calculator is E1.
What does not help, is Microsoft push their E plans or 365 business plans, Exchange Online Plan1/2 are not listed on the menu bar.
https://products.office.com/en-gb/business/enterprise-productivity-tools
I can't click straight towards Exchange Online Plans. So most people get to be taken for a ride by RackSpace because of that.
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Rackspace's Exchange offering does offer some nice things like 100GB mailboxes instead of 50GB. But if you don't need that (we sure don't) it's worth exactly zero. And you don't get support from the Exchange team but only from a third party. As this isn't open source, that's a huge negative. Also a big negative is RS' recent decline in support quality. Not that MS is good, but RS doesn't have the edge that they used to have. Larger users are routinely having major support issues with them. Their idea of fanatical support has dropped to "a little below industry average" support. Still decent, but not something you'd pay for.
Rackspace does bundle in Skype for Business, which we get with O365 and turn off as it is worth than useless. But if you want that, it's an added feature. If you don't, it's in the way. So you could take this as a benefit or a deficit depending on the situation.
But RS Exchange is not comparable to E1 as it lacks Sharepoint, the key upgrade feature of E1 over Hosted Exchange. It's far more like Hosted Exchange.
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@Breffni-Potter said:
Right, so what I'm saying is that the closest plan they are using on their calculator is E1.
Ah, and I don't agree. I see the closest as Hosted Exchange and Hosted Exchange being the only one applicable to a discussion about email. Unless the purpose is added E1 features, it's a red herring.
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@Breffni-Potter said:
What does not help, is Microsoft push their E plans or 365 business plans, Exchange Online Plan1/2 are not listed on the menu bar.
https://products.office.com/en-gb/business/enterprise-productivity-tools
I can't click straight towards Exchange Online Plans. So most people get to be taken for a ride by RackSpace because of that.
@Dashrender and I have had this discussion too. But anytime I Google Hosted Exchange, it takes me directly to the $4 plans every time. I've not had the issues having those plans front and centre when I look for hosted Exchange offerings.
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For reference, when talking email, the crossover point in cost savings is 75%. If you have 75% non-Exchange or more, Rackspace's hybrid offering savings money compared to Office 365's email offering.
Of course the two solutions are different. Even if the cost is exactly the same, RS offers twice the storage on one quarter of the mailboxes, but O365 offers double on three quarters of them. RS offers Skype for Business for one quarter of your users, O365 offers a unified experience for all users. It's two very different approaches.
But it is very important to understand that when talking email between the two solutions, which is essentially all either one is, that 75:25 is the reflection point for cost savings. And it isn't just 75% today, you have to maintain that ratio for forever or you start to lose money. And at break even, I think far less than 5% of businesses would prefer the weird complexity of the hybrid model compared to the unified "everyone gets the same features" model.
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@Breffni-Potter said:
Right, so what I'm saying is that the closest plan they are using on their calculator is E1.
What does not help, is Microsoft push their E plans or 365 business plans, Exchange Online Plan1/2 are not listed on the menu bar.
https://products.office.com/en-gb/business/enterprise-productivity-tools
I can't click straight towards Exchange Online Plans. So most people get to be taken for a ride by RackSpace because of that.
This is something I've argued with Scott about in the past. I agree with you! MS should post the $4/month plan on the same page as the other O365 offerings so customers who don't need SharePoint, don't need Skype for Business, don't need Online versions of Office can save themselves those fees and be completely aware of the $4/month option.
Instead they obfuscate that information by posting Hosted Exchange on it's own page with little to no linking to O365 at all.
Perhaps MS doesn't consider Hosted Exchange an actual O365 offering - instead it's just an offering, but it's not part of the O365 family. Sadly that normal business executive doesn't understand this, and when they do their inquiry, they start by saying - Hey I heard about this Office 365 thing - that's email, right? and the sales person they are talking to never even brings up the sole offering of Hosted Exchange offered for $4/u/m.
Now - that said. Why is the OP looking at E1 plans? At 100 users, unless they expect explosive growth, they should be looking at the Small Business plans. And the lowest plan there is $5/u/m, which gives them Hosted Exchange, SharePoint, Skype for Business and Online versions of Office. and that price is still HALF the offering price that Rackspace has for just hosted Exchange, but includes all the extras.
Scott, at SpiceWold last year, Rackspace rep told me that their Hosted Exchange service was in fact now O365 hosted by MS, it's not on their systems any longer.
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@Dashrender said:
Scott, at SpiceWold last year, Rackspace rep told me that their Hosted Exchange service was in fact now O365 hosted by MS, it's not on their systems any longer.
So we pay a $6 premium for their trigger happy sales rep? Sweet.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@Breffni-Potter said:
What does not help, is Microsoft push their E plans or 365 business plans, Exchange Online Plan1/2 are not listed on the menu bar.
https://products.office.com/en-gb/business/enterprise-productivity-tools
I can't click straight towards Exchange Online Plans. So most people get to be taken for a ride by RackSpace because of that.
@Dashrender and I have had this discussion too. But anytime I Google Hosted Exchange, it takes me directly to the $4 plans every time. I've not had the issues having those plans front and centre when I look for hosted Exchange offerings.
I agree that googling hosted Exchange gets you where you need to go, but people, execs, aren't googling hosted exchange.. they are googling Office 365.
Scott of course will say that that is their own fault, they shouldn't be googling anything. Instead they should be hiring either internally or externally people who are doing their jobs correctly, and that is asking what the goal is, and then finding as close an exact match to that goal as possible.
In this case the hired person would say - what is your goal? The executive would say I want to have email. Then the hired hand would do research on email solutions, and if they do their job correctly would discover plain jane hosted exchange for $4. Not sure I'd agree with that last part, but it's Scott's position - unless he says otherwise here, then I'll stand corrected to his corrected statement.
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@scottalanmiller said:
For reference, when talking email, the crossover point in cost savings is 75%. If you have 75% non-Exchange or more, Rackspace's hybrid offering savings money compared to Office 365's email offering.
Of course the two solutions are different. Even if the cost is exactly the same, RS offers twice the storage on one quarter of the mailboxes, but O365 offers double on three quarters of them. RS offers Skype for Business for one quarter of your users, O365 offers a unified experience for all users. It's two very different approaches.
But it is very important to understand that when talking email between the two solutions, which is essentially all either one is, that 75:25 is the reflection point for cost savings. And it isn't just 75% today, you have to maintain that ratio for forever or you start to lose money. And at break even, I think far less than 5% of businesses would prefer the weird complexity of the hybrid model compared to the unified "everyone gets the same features" model.
This also assumes that the 75% don't use activesync. That's another $1/u/m. Just one more piece of the puzzle that majorly plays a part in the money talk.
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@Breffni-Potter said:
@Dashrender said:
Scott, at SpiceWold last year, Rackspace rep told me that their Hosted Exchange service was in fact now O365 hosted by MS, it's not on their systems any longer.
So we pay a $6 premium for their trigger happy sales rep? Sweet.
That is what they told me.
Though I did post this before I finished reading the thread. It seems that Scott found more information (RS Hosted Exchange gives 100 GB/user and Skype for Business) so that implies that they must still have an offering that it's real O365.
The RS calculator shows only Exchange Mailboxes - so with their local hosted Exchange, yeah they give you two things, 100 GB mailboxes and Skype for Business for $10/u/m
Where Hosted Exchange from MS only gives you 50 GB mailboxes for $4/u/m
or with a small business O365 plan from MS, you can get 50 GB mailboxes and Skype for Business, and SharePoint, and Office apps online.
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@Dashrender said:
Perhaps MS doesn't consider Hosted Exchange an actual O365 offering - instead it's just an offering, but it's not part of the O365 family.
That appears to be true, but a more recent change and very odd as it is clearly part of the unified O365 system.
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@Dashrender said:
I agree that googling hosted Exchange gets you where you need to go, but people, execs, aren't googling hosted exchange.. they are googling Office 365.
That's super weird, searching on a license model rather than a product.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@Dashrender said:
Perhaps MS doesn't consider Hosted Exchange an actual O365 offering - instead it's just an offering, but it's not part of the O365 family.
That appears to be true, but a more recent change and very odd as it is clearly part of the unified O365 system.
Exactly! and that is what frustrates me that it's not listed right there along side the other O365 offerings. Why don't they list it - because they don't want people to even consider it. Out of site out of mind. This to me is no different than a sales person not telling you about an option that they know is what you want, but they know they can get you to over buy by simply not mentioning it.
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@Dashrender said:
Scott of course will say that that is their own fault, they shouldn't be googling anything. Instead they should be hiring either internally or externally people who are doing their jobs correctly, and that is asking what the goal is, and then finding as close an exact match to that goal as possible.
In this case the hired person would say - what is your goal? The executive would say I want to have email. Then the hired hand would do research on email solutions, and if they do their job correctly would discover plain jane hosted exchange for $4. Not sure I'd agree with that last part, but it's Scott's position - unless he says otherwise here, then I'll stand corrected to his corrected statement.
This. Or, you know, at a minimum know how to Google what you are looking for and not inject proximate assumptions into the process instead.
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@Dashrender said:
This also assumes that the 75% don't use activesync. That's another $1/u/m. Just one more piece of the puzzle that majorly plays a part in the money talk.
Correct. We could figure out that number pretty quickly. But if they use ActiveSync it is going to make it super hard to make the prices make sense.
If you need ActiveSync, you need at least 86% of your users on RS Mail rather than Exchange for it to be break even in cost.
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@Dashrender said:
Exactly! and that is what frustrates me that it's not listed right there along side the other O365 offerings. Why don't they list it - because they don't want people to even consider it. Out of site out of mind. This to me is no different than a sales person not telling you about an option that they know is what you want, but they know they can get you to over buy by simply not mentioning it.
It's more like a sales rep that walks you past a big display of the right product to upsell you on another one. The web site is a sales rep, just an automated one. So I agree. If you use Google, nothing is hidden. If you want MS to provide all of the comparisons on one screen, you'll get shown the ones that they want you to compare.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@Dashrender said:
I agree that googling hosted Exchange gets you where you need to go, but people, execs, aren't googling hosted exchange.. they are googling Office 365.
That's super weird, searching on a license model rather than a product.
Execs don't know that O365 is a licensing model, they think it's a product. Heck, I'm not sure most execs would even know what Exchange or Domino or RS mail, etc even is.
SMB execs might know a little more because smaller company, closer to the action and all..
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@Dashrender said:
Execs don't know that O365 is a licensing model, they think it's a product. Heck, I'm not sure most execs would even know what Exchange or Domino or RS mail, etc even is.
Even a pretty entry level exec (heck, even a high school student interested in becoming an exec) would know that execs don't look up products. Execs don't research manufacturing equipment, cable makers, snack food vendors, etc. They research the right people to provide the right decisions.
If an exec is doing the research that his IT department should be doing, there is failure so early in the process that nothing that we or MS does is going to fix it. It means that no knowledgeable party is involved in the process. That's a short circuit so far back that there just isn't a reason for IT to worry about it because it means IT was never engaged. Any exec bypassing IT for IT decision making is asking to have bad decisions to be made and means that the failure is in basic management, not something for IT or vendors to fix.
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@Dashrender said:
SMB execs might know a little more because smaller company, closer to the action and all..
Or less because they have more things to deal with, less exposure and fewer opportunities to be exposed to what others are doing.
