Opinion: The complexity surrounding Microsoft Exchange could bring benefits to solution providers that invest in understanding the product.One of the best and tried-and-true strategies for any solution provider is to find out where the customer has the most amount of pain and then offer a solution that promises relief.
Within the land of IT, nothing is a bigger pain to own, manage and run than Microsoft Exchange. Everywhere you go customers have horror stories about the installation, maintenance and, above all, uptime of their Microsoft Exchange implementations. And worse yet, they will all tell you they are paying top dollar for the privilege because the expertise needed to successfully run a Microsoft Exchange server is some of the most expensive in the IT labor pool.
None of this has been lost on at least three companies that in recent months have set about delivering tools and services that make it easier for solution providers to manage Microsoft Exchange servers.
The first solution worthy of note is an appliance offering from Azaleos that provides a stable environment for deploying Microsoft Exchange servers and then remotely managing them. This appliance could be seen as an act of atonement because many of the founders of Azaleos worked on the Microsoft team that gave us Exchange. The company has an exclusive distribution agreement with Avnet to sell the appliance through the channel.
Often, the IT department resists handing over control of Exchange, in which case you might want to look at OpManager from ManageEngine. The tool makes it possible to remotely monitor a locally installed Microsoft Exchange server. The tool allows the IT department to save face by appearing to only supplement its expertise with third-party help.
Yet a third approach calls for the outsourcing of the Exchange server environment to either Microsoft or companies such as GroupSpark, which provide hosted Exchange implementations that can be resold by channel partners. Differences between Microsoft and GroupSpark might be subtle, but GroupSpark's obvious benefit is to keep the vendor one step removed from the customer.
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Whatever path solution providers ultimately use to take advantage of the opportunity, it's clear the solid little cottage industry emerging around the frailties of Exchange points to channel opportunity. And customers are willing to pay for those services because of all their applications.
E-mail is considered the most mission-critical, a simple fact that is only going to become more evident once more organizations begin using Exchange as the underpinning of a unified communications architecture that is going to tie voice and video to the Exchange server. And if you think people get upset when they can't access their e-mail, imagine what will happen when they can't make a call because the Exchange server is down.
What all this means is that the complexity surrounding Microsoft Exchange, no matter what Microsoft says, is not likely to be reduced any time soon. As a result, solution providers that make the investment necessary to master the intricacy of Microsoft Exchange are going to benefit from that investment for years to come.
Michael Vizard is editorial director of Ziff Davis Enterprise. He can be reached at michael.vizard@ziffdavisenterprise.com.
