Every six months or so the mainstream tech press publishes a story about the “eminent demise” of email. It’s a tantalizing headline, in the same vein as “2010 Will Herald the Year of the Paperless Office” or “The Fax Machine is Dead – RIP.” But in fact email is not dying, and is still the primary communications medium for every business. What is happening is people are shifting some of their personal communication habits from one to one email accounts to one to many “broadcasts” via Twitter, Facebook, etc.
It’s this evolution of communication habits and preferences that is exciting to watch and be part of. Whether it’s an email or a tweet, it still content that is created by a person and shared. Sometimes its personal, sometimes its business. And in a corporate setting that content needs to be preserved for a variety of reasons: compliance, posterity, storage management and best business practices. That’s where Sonian lives. Preserving this content as your “trusted digital caretaker.”
Sonian is at the nexus of three waves of change: Rising interest in cloud computing, increasing demand for software as a service, and a mandate to get the best return on IT budget investment.
Tags: email
Email’s “announced death”, the future of collaboration tools and wave of change are rather interesting topics. First email is far from dead, almost every online sign-up sheet still requires it and treats it as your central digital identity (something like OpenID may someday change this but it hasn’t yet). If the general online world hasn’t acknowledged email’s dead for the consumer, the business world certainly isn’t ready to change it’s core communication tool. That said, Email has not really evolved much in the last decade and I don’t see groundbreaking changes in the near future. Many of today’s newer social tools mimic email from an end-user perspective. Some of these tools such as Twitter have the similar Spam issues that email faces in it’s model. Other models such as Facebook have created new definitions of spam such as updating your status often for games, quizzes and virtual gifts to all connections. A Google Wave type communication system may someday kill email but, based on early reports, that’s clearly not here yet.
But each tool is used slightly different by each user but the one common element that they all face is data retention and the ability to easily find a specific item from the past. In the consumer world, that means the ability to easy find and retrieve past items. In the business world, record retention requirements are usually in place but they usually boil down to two standards; reason and risk. I’d imagine that these same two standards will hold true to all collaboration tools that an enterprise will embrace in the social evolution. For email archiving, Sonian takes into account both the user and the business needs which are equally important.
Two things that have evolved greatly is virtualization technology and bandwidth. These two factors of course allowed successful Cloud services such as Sonian to be developed. The cloud (Public, Private and Hybrid) is alive and has evolved greatly, Trust may still need time to evolve. Luckily the consumer segment seems to have embraced that Trust in it’s data (for the most part), that usually means more businesses will warm up to the SaaS model over time. Lower cost models do not mean cheap services, they mean opportunity for you to save money and focus on your core business.
In business news you always hear the word “Kill” or “Dead” in a story because it grabs attention, 95% of the time it is false such is the case with email. However, the ones that are true usually are associated to poor spending or not evolving quick enough. Lack of Trust in the cloud is mostly a control issue but some will embrace change. Seriously think about that, your competitors are…