The Road to Office 365 - It's Not 'If' but 'When' and 'How'

If there’s one thing we can be sure about it’s that, at some point in the future, almost nobody will manage mailboxes on premises.  The dominant players look like being Microsoft with Office 365 and Google with Google Apps, though of course others may emerge.

Not surprisingly, then, pretty much every CIO in the world has taken a look at these platforms and adopted a stance.  The stance may involve proactive planning now with a rapid migration in mind, or it might be a case of keeping things as they are until the technology matures further.  Or there might be any number of interim steps that will make a migration easier at some point in the future.  I would wager that there is no CIO that hasn’t started thinking about migrating email, in its entirety, to the cloud.

For the last few years Mimecast has positioned itself as a companion technology to Microsoft Exchange, optimizing our cloud services to deliver maximum value to on premises or hosted Exchange customers.  And now, of course, we’re also providing services for Office 365 customers, in both cloud-only and hybrid environments.  Of our 9,000 or so customers, almost all of whom are on some form of Exchange, we are seeing a growing number using Mimecast and Office 365 together.  With Office 365, we support very clear use cases that address specific customer needs that can’t be met by Office 365 on its own.  It could be a particular compliance or eDiscovery need, or a desire for a ‘cloud-on-cloud’ High Availability solution to protect against downtime.

Office 365 may be the eventual destination for most businesses, but that doesn’t mean there is a crazy rush to migrate there or indeed that it’s the only short to mid-term option.  For example, we’re seeing the Managed Service Provider (MSP) market booming, as smaller businesses offload their Exchange infrastructures and move to hosted Exchange suppliers.  At the other end of the scale, Exchange 13 is an attractive option for companies who want to keep their mailboxes on-site.  And we’re seeing a fair amount of hybrid deployment, with IT moving a subset of users to the cloud, with an independent archive like Mimecast’s giving them the flexibility to toggle mailboxes back and forth between on premises and cloud as they see fit.

But let’s not kid ourselves.  These are all interim measures, albeit interim measures that will be very profitable for those organizations operating in the space for some years to come.

The point, I guess, is that we’re all preparing for an Office 365 world.  At Mimecast, we are building out and optimizing our Office 365-specific portfolio so the use cases are crystal clear.  It’s not simply a question of offering alternative tools to those that Microsoft includes with its Office 365 SKUs, but showing how we offer additional layers of functionality that support specific customer needs.  That way, over time, we actually see ourselves becoming an accelerator, or enabler for Office 365 adoption, since we effectively remove short-term barriers to adoption.

Naturally, Microsoft is working hard to add functionality of its own and make Office 365 as robust and feature rich as possible.  Many of the ‘gaps’ that Michael Osterman calls out in his paper, Office 365 for the Enterprise: How to Strengthen Security, Compliance and Control, will be filled by Microsoft over the coming years.  So does that mean third parties will find it hard to build businesses within this ecosystem?  No.  In fact, as the platform matures, more use cases will emerge just as happened with Exchange many years ago.

Microsoft will certainly want to make sure that the common elements of customer need are properly served by Office 365 off the shelf, but this is a company, unlike Google, that has always been committed to its partners, and to the creation of a vibrant community of ISVs around its core platforms. Office 365 will be no different, and there will be plenty of room for third parties who can help customers not only see over the short term hurdles, but enjoy a first class, zero compromise cloud experience in the longer term.