The market for hosted e-mail mailboxes is poised for rapid growth due to the economics of cloud computing and the entry of new vendors, according to Gartner Inc. Gartner analysts are of the opinion that the move to a hosted-delivery model will change the face of IT architectures over the next decade and that e-mail will be at the forefront of this change.

Gartner predicts that by 2012, hosters will offer enterprises with generic mail with the opportunity to make significant savings on total e-mail operating costs and prices set to fall from the current average of $10 per user per month to $2 per user per month.

Matt Cain, research vice president at Gartner said that the demand for e-mail storage will also create demand for hosted services. "Most organisations currently cap mailboxes at around 200MB and allow the creation of local archives to accommodate needs for more storage. However many organisations would like to move away from local archives and would be attracted to a more cost-effective hosting model, where one-gigabyte mail stores are now the starting point," Cain said.

The uptake of hosted e-mail will start with small companies, move through midsize companies and finally become an appealing model to the largest enterprises (more than 50,000 seats) by 2012.

Microsoft and Google are already using the education community as a testing ground for their push into hosted enterprise e-mail, both offering no-fee services for students, staff and faculty. Gartner believes that this hybrid model (on-premises and hosted) will become increasingly popular for enterprises whereby certain a population of users (those without extensive e-mail and calendar needs) will use Outlook Web Access (OWA) ‘in the cloud’ at a low price point, while the company maintains a population of Outlook/Exchange users at headquarters.

"Hosting vendors will bundle instant messaging, presence and teamware services along with e-mail. E-mail will also be increasingly tied to social software tools, enabling the automatic insertion of social data into messages from previously networked senders, providing another competitive advantage to larger vendors which straddle the consumer/enterprise continuum, such as Google, Microsoft and Yahoo," said Cain.