Why I’m Excited about Cisco WebEx Mail
I’m excited about Cisco’s announcement today of Cisco WebEx Mail on three levels - as a Cisco employee, as an industry observer, and as an end-user. Let me address two of those in this blog post.
As an email user, I am an IT nightmare. I receive large graphics files, video files and MP3s. My mailbox is full all the time. So I have created close to 100 PSTs, on my hard drive. Those emails are no longer on the server, no longer available to be backed up, no longer availability for e-discovery. And I complain about it. So the option of moving to Cisco WebEx Mail with up to 35G capacity while using that familiar Outlook interface as well as my Blackberry is exciting. Thankfully I’m scheduled to be one of the first group of Cisco employees on Cisco WebEx Mail.
As an industry observer, I’m excited about stirring things up. Email has been stagnant for a long time. Traditional solutions have changed little in the past 20 years. Google has come in from the consumer side and caused some disruption, causing businesses to think about the cloud and to think about some of the existing limitations on capacity in the legacy email offerings. But larger enterprises are reluctant to make major changes in the user experience.
Cisco WebEx Mail is a hosted offering, moving email to the cloud at a very affordable price: $5/user/month for the standard client package including webmail client, native Outlook support, IronPort AS/AV, high availability ActiveSync support and 5G capacity. BlackBerry support can be added for $1/user/month. The webmail client, IronPort and 5G capacity are available for $3.50/mailbox/month.
This will shake things up!
by Alex Hadden Boyd, director of marketing, Cisco Collaboration Software Group
Posted by Alex Hadden Boyd at 10:35AM PST
Jarett Nixon Nov 9, 2009
Sounds like it is going to be a great solution. Will it work with more than one mobile phone platform? I.e. the iPhone in addition to the Blackberry?