A Hybrid Exchange

I’m doing a lot of cloud reading of late which is handy as I’m off to present at mashup* Cloud Computing tonight in London which is hosted at one of Sun’s offices. Should be fun :)

A few things have caught my eye in addition to the recent post titled Fill Your Sunday with Cloud Computing.

First up is Ted Schadler on the Forrester Blog who talks about Exchange 2010 and the potential to move occasional users to the cloud. He remarks that our S+S strategy has evolved in to product offerings that span on-premises deployments to cloud hosted. This is the “server/service symmetry” that Ray Ozzie has spoken of in the past and though I’m not sure that term means much to a lot of folks, this is precisely what Ray meant – extending products to work in a number of deployment approaches, particularly server products, with no impact on the client (client as in user or client software).

To you and I what that means is you can deploy Exchange on-premises, with a partner, or in the cloud or have a hybrid of all of these and it has no visible difference to the end user. What Ted focuses on is the notion of moving a portion of your users to a cloud hosted service whilst keeping its high-volume mailboxes on-premise. You don’t need Exchange 2010 to do this as it happens – the deskless worker option for Microsoft Online enabled you to do this today for $2 per user per month. Fair play to Ted, he does mention this too but the key is he reckons that can save you $100 per user, per year…not to be sniffed at in today's world. The flip side of course is it could add cost as you add users to your email estate that previously weren’t covered but the cost of this is far less than before.  Basically you have options....some very good ones.

I was going to post another piece on cloud regarding a David Chappell presentation on Azure and other cloud providers but I’ll save that for another email.

What I’m pleased to see is that increasingly the S+S approach is being accepted at the best way forward with the cloud even if people aren’t using that term which is fine. It’ll be interesting to see how this goes down tonight…