For most businesses, e-mail is a lifeline, an absolute necessity. But managing it in-house can be no small task – buying and setting up the server hardware and software, maintaining it all, supporting users, regularly updating and upgrading, and battling viruses and spam.
Now, riding the global software-as-a-service wave, Pawtucket-based RhodeOne Technology Solutions is offering an alternative: fully supported Microsoft Exchange-based e-mail systems for $9.95 per user per month, with remote and mobile access and integrated SharePoint services.
Rick Norberg, president of RhodeOne, the first and only local vendor offering this service, explained in a recent interview how it works and the business case for it.
PBN: Software-as-a-service (SaaS) seems to be taking hold in a lot of business applications and even with home users. Why?
NORBERG: As a consumer, software is something that you buy and three years later it’s not worth anything, so … why not just rent it? [When people buy software], they want value; they want to solve a problem; they want to perform a task. That’s what you’re getting when you buy software as a service. … For our customers, it comes with software assurance, maintenance and consulting built into it, so they’re really paying for the service of having e-mail without having to worry about any of the other costs … and they can write it off as an operational expense rather than have to depreciate it over time.
PBN: Why does this model work well with e-mail in particular?
NORBERG: E-mail is a system that has to be constantly maintained and upgraded. You need backups and upgrades and virus and spam protection. … With software-as-a-service, you benefit from economies of scale; rather than have someone maintain your system, you’re on a shared system with a lot of other people, so we can provide the same system you’d find in a very large company to a small or medium-size business, because we’re aggregating all the employees together.
PBN: How do small businesses typically handle e-mail now?
NORBERG: A 10-person company, for example, either has a POP mail system, like Yahoo! or Google, or a small-business server on the site, which may or may not have shared calendars and such. Setting up the server may cost them $10,000 to $25,000; we can provide them a server for e-mail for those 10 people for less than $100 a month.
PBN: What about businesses that already have servers? Why switch?
NORBERG: Some companies have all-in-one boxes [to support their in-house networks as well as e-mail], or they rent e-mail service from someone else or get it for free. The problem with free services is, there’s no collaboration. One of the things this system offers you is, if I have contacts or tasks or appointments on my calendar that I want to share, you can, from your desk, look at my calendar, so you can plan more efficiently. … Most small businesses don’t have that, and if they have the small-business version of Exchange e-mail, they can only usually get it in the office, not remotely, and they tend to have severe spam problems, whereas we offer them high-end spam and virus protection.
PBN: You’re encouraging clients to not only use you for e-mail, but also to host their servers.
NORBERG: We offer SharePoint services [for collaboration, integrated file management and sharing, and so on], and we have two customers who don’t actually have a server on site. They collaborate and share all of their information online through a SharePoint portal, which is Web-based, so you can get there anywhere, anytime. And they have e-mail with that as well, and coming down the line, there will be other software-as-a-service applications that will integrate with that. So the ultimate goal is, within a couple years’ time you should have a completely virtual office.
PBN: What does that mean on your end? What kind of setup do you have?
NORBERG: Our system resides in two cabinets in a data center in downtown Providence. We have 20-plus servers that all have multiple, redundant roles – there [are] several firewalls, several Exchange servers, several hub servers … so that if any of those components fails, there’s a replacement for it right away. And it’s managed on a daily basis. •
