An upcoming report by the Yankee Group warns that Microsoft Exchange may lose around 23 percent of its customers to open source mail solutions in the next year and a half. To be released in April, the report claims that companies will move to an open- source mail solution because decision makers believe that open source is both easier to manage and cost-effective.
After surveying roughly 1,000 IT managers and C-level executives from companies of all sizes, the group found that 65 percent of the respondents were currently running Exchange. According to the numbers, this means that, of the 650 current Exchange customers, 150 of them will move to open source in the next two years. There was no mention of how many respondents not currently running Exchange would move to a Microsoft solution, though. Without that number, it's hard to tell whether Microsoft would truly be affected by the customers who would move away from Exchange.
Reports from consulting firms are typically met with a high amount of skepticism, and this one is no different. Even the analyst who was responsible for the report, Yankee Group's Laura DiDio, questioned whether respondents would follow through on their responses. "What people say in the heat of the moment, they won't always carry through on," she said. DiDio mentioned that some customers complete the surveys without any real idea about what IT decisions will be made. She cited a report from 2001 claiming that 38 percent of respondents planned to migrate away from Windows.
