What should you pay for email?

Sitting in on the Tuesday keynote at Lotusphere focused on LotusLive (formerly Bluehouse), Lotus' new online offering that includes email, Web conferencing, instant messaging and other services all delivered via a cloud-based model.

Kevin Cavanaugh, VP of Messaging and Collaboration for Lotus, asked "what should email cost?" His contention is that above 10,000 users, on-premise Notes is less expensive than in-the-cloud services, but that for smaller organizations or for those that do not have optimized deployments, cloud-based services are less expensive.

Our research generally agrees, finding that for small companies the cost of running email is dramatically more expensive on-premise because of the minimal economies of scale that exist in smaller organizations. Even large organizations can realize cost benefits from in-the-cloud email services, but the savings are not as dramatic.