Software-as-a-service email set to boom

Email provided as software-as-a-service will continue to grow over the next three years and give application providers multiple opportunities for development projects, according to new research from Gartner.

The SaaS email market only takes up 1% of the commercial email market as of 2007, but that figure will continue to grow to 20% by 2012, the firm predicts.

The company also says that as email as SaaS becomes more popular, third-party apps such as email management tools, and tools used for moving email systems from on-site servers to the “cloud”, will become more popular.

“To a certain extent, this winnowing of opportunities for third parties in the email market has been under way ever since Microsoft’s Exchange 2007 incorporated features such as virus and spam blocking, voicemail and disaster recovery, which had previously been addressed only by third parties,” Gartner research vice president Matt Cain told ITnews.com.au.

“In many ways, email is the ‘litmus test’ for the SaaS model, disrupting a pre-existing set of on-premises related businesses. We can expect similar third-party dynamics to occur in adjacent collaboration spaces, such as instant messaging and virtual workspaces.”