I’ve been taking part in a number of migrations from both on-premise installations and hosted solutions to the cloud in recent years.
It was pretty peculiar to find out how many folks around are still using legacy systems (from the standpoint of those who daily deal with cutting edge technology of course) like Exchange 2000 or even some POP servers with really limited functionality to say the least.
To strengthen my amusement was the fact that the most conservative businesses are the big organizations having access to bigger financial resources than SMBs. It is a kind of of ‘set it and forget it’ approach that, however, has its reasoning. Migration from such installations with hundreds of users actively using their emails usually takes at least a month an rarely turns to be completely painless. Moreover, many are skeptical to touch systems that ‘work’ and a bunch of new features and possibilities current messaging systems provide do not look very seducing under such circumstances.
And here comes product lifecycle that often becomes a change driver.
Just a few months still remaining before the extended support ends for Exchange 2000 (not Conferencing server) that would inevitably mean certain difficulties for those maintaining in-house installations.
Exchange 2003 that is a flagship for most on-premise installations (yes, the number of Exchange 2007 installations is significantly smaller!) maintains its positions and will likely fall only to Exchange 2010 serving as another accelerator for a change.
These business if they prepare for the move will prepare moving to Exchange 2010 skipping Exchange 2007 due to not only a richer set of new features but also because of lower TCO and higher reliability.
Exchange 2007 is not going to retire soon apparently. However, some complexities involved in its deployment and some technology tremendously improved in Exchange 2010 (like storage design for example) do position the latter as a market leader and obvious market driver for years to come.
Having invested in Exchange 2010 the businesses may feel safe and quiet for a decade ahead:
Another trend worth mentioning is that more and more big organizations start outsourcing their messaging infrastructure to the cloud after they realize the cloud has become a reliable place for keeping sensitive data providing higher levels of safety, redundancy, reliability, support than many on-premise implementations. Lower TCO adds more value too.
Nice trend and I’m excited to see how the messaging evolves from mostly on-premise installations to the cloud based feature rich solutions benefitting businesses around the globe.
Exchange rocks!
. I’ve read most of them but such courses are always of a big value and do provide concise and in-depth overview of the product.
Just upgraded my home Exchange lab to Exchange 2010 SP1 Beta. The upgrade went smooth, no problems so far and I’m really excited to try those 
