Hosted email has been available for quite some time, but the arrival of new “cloud-based” solutions offered by technology heavyweights such as Google (GoogleApps), Microsoft (Microsoft Online Service), Apple (MobileMe) and even IBM (Bluehouse) are stirring up a renewed debate of the pros and cons of using these services at an enterprise level.

Last week’s outage at Google, recent repeat problems at Amazon’s S3 storage services and Apple’s “insanely grating” MobileMe launch highlight the need to carefully consider all aspects when weighing hosted vs. on-premise solutions.

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Everybody has heard of the 80/20 rule, also called the Pareto principle, which states that in many cases, business and otherwise, 80% of the effects come only from 20% of causes. Email is no exception – however, the ratio is far more extreme.

Our analysis of large messaging environments over many years has revealed that in most companies 80% of the corporate messaging resources are being consumed by only about 1% of all employees.

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IBM released last week a new data migration tool intended to ease the movement of large amounts of data from existing content platforms such as SharePoint, Exchange Public Folders, Domino Document Libraries and other repositories (see coverage here, here and here). The tool also provides synchronization capabilities to enable platform coexistence during extended migration periods.

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Bob Spurzem on the Ferris blog sees the same exponential pattern that Gordon Moore predicted for electronic circuits to apply to the growth of email.

“Consider email quantity. Where once we sent and received only a handful of emails daily, today we routinely send and receive hundreds of emails. You might argue that the volumes are increasing exponentially.

Finally, consider mailbox size. A 10MB mailbox was once the norm and was replaced with 100-200MB mailboxes in recent years. Today users expect multigigabyte mailboxes, made famous by Google’s Gmail.”

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Ken Gartner filling in.

Rumors, urban myths, scams and other undesirable communiques have a remarkably long shelf life on the Internet. Periodically they get ‘rediscovered’ and disseminated as if they were hot news, worthy of everyone’s immediate interest. When this happens with an inflammatory email broadcast widely in a business environment, the results are, sadly, quite predictable. The message and its ensuing forwards and replies take on a viral spike initially, and periodically latecomers to the party add their 2 cents to reignite outrage, flame wars and general ill-will among the populace. Email takes rumor mongering and kvetching at the corporate water cooler to a new extreme.

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A Happy New Year to all.

According to Basex, a NY-based research firm led by Jonathan Spira, information overload is the “Problem of the Year” for 2008.

Basex released a study at the end of last month, claiming that information and collaboration overload consumes almost 30% of a knowledge worker’s workday, which may cost the U.S. economy as much as $588 billion a year.

“As much as e-mail, instant messages, blogs and their brethren technologies have helped knowledge workers better collaborate, interruptions and duplications derived from these forms of digital communication and content are overwhelming workers to the point of distraction.”

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