I was interested to see that Spanish email specialist, Spamina, is now heading our way with a channel development campaign and a new UK Country Manager, Daniel Power. The company is targeting resellers, integrators, Cloud service providers servicing the small and medium sized enterprise market.
Email is, of course, an obvious market to go for with an outsourced service, and the company has done well in both Spain and other Spanish-speaking countries. So now it is moving out into the English-speaking world. Recent research by the Radicati Group has suggested that email security solutions will be worth more than $7bn by 2014, no doubt because that is one area where the vast majority of users understand why security tools are important. Many will have been hit at least once in their lives by a virus or spam attack.
It is hoping to attract channel partners with both its security tools, which provide email perimeter security for all types of Cloud environment, including what will be most users’ de facto reality, hybrid mixtures of Clouds, and its marketing package. This is built around an online management tool that channel partners can use to create and then manage new customer accounts, run unlimited online demonstrations for new prospects, and automate the accounts management and renewal processes.
The company is also launching an email archiving service, which it sees as adding important compliance and governance capabilities, as well as content search facilities.
Email is likely to be an important service to observe over the next year or two, for it could prove to be the bellwether of how the Cloud gets taken up by typical enterprise users, particularly in the SME sector. Such businesses are usually far too concerned with their own issues to fret about being an early adopter of any technology not immediately relevant to their business. And with the Cloud representing a significant conceptual shift from traditional on-premise IT, these businesses are likely to hang back from adopting Cloud solutions, even if the arguments in favour of such a move are strong.
But email has the advantage of being easily perceived as a `service package’ already closely allied to not only Internet technology but also with connecting the business to `the world out there’. By offering email management and security as a packaged service, Spamina is already generating market traction in Spanish-speaking areas.
I would be interested to hear from any company thinking that off-loading email management to a service like this is an approach they would pursue, particularly if they also have no current plans to move to Cloud-based services. After all, the same basic market approach is being adopted by the likes of Computacenter to target email management in large enterprises and, let’s face it, managing email systems has become both time and resource consuming, and of considerable importance to running a business.
The one observation I would make is that, while Computacenter has email management services as the first in a list of business service cherries it is aiming to pick off, Spamina may need to be looking a bit further ahead than it appears to be doing. This does not mean it should be looking to other markets, but there are new opportunities emerging in the world of exploiting email capabilities – it is already well beyond being a simple message-passing tool.
For example, tools now exist to allow email content to be integrated into a wider, richer set of business services. Tools such as MashApps from Cordys, for example, might be used to mash up email contents with other business applications and processes, all under the control of a Business Process Management system.
Then there is the coming problem of managing and exploiting employee use of social networking tools. Some suggest that these will replace much of the current workload of email, leaving the latter with just the `official documentation’ stage of communications. If that becomes the case then the need for email management tools will start to diminish, while at the same time a vast amount of valuable content may be left unharvested, if not lost completely.
Such trends do, however, make building a strong channel network an important step, for these will be the businesses with ears to the ground. The smart ones will know not only where the current business can be found, but also what services and capabilities will be required in future. The really smart ones are likely to become the dominant brands for such services in the minds of future customers.
