Tag: email

Mimecast and the future of email

Email continues to the key computer business application says Mimecast’s CEO Peter Bauer

Email remains the biggest business app in the world says Peter Bauer, the CEO and co-founder of mail management service Mimecast.

Boston based, South African born Bauer founded his company to “make email safer for business” and after launching in his home country and attracting 14,000 customers and spoke in Sydney about his company and how email is changing in the world of the cloud.

In many respects email is one of those applications – like SMS – that happened by accident. In it’s early days no-one intended or expected those messaging systems to become key communications services.

“I started my IT career in the mid-1990s as an e-mail systems engineer and if you think back to the mid 90s no business cared much about email at all,” says Bauer who believes the experience gave him a unique perspective to how the service evolved into a key business application.

Over the next ten years Bauer saw how email became the personal filing systems for most workers and put systems under pressure as companies had to manage large file stores with the associated compliance and discovery risks.

The security risks too were huge as email became the preferred malware delivery system as virus and spyware writers used infected messages to get onto users’ systems, a problem that has become worse as ransomware and phishing attacks have become common.

“Because business operations and process became dependent upon email, it became necessary to make the service highly available,” says Bauer in emphasising how important it has become to most large and small enterprises.

Even with the shift to the cloud, most companies have remained with email with companies moving to Microsoft’s Office365 – Bauer claims the take up has doubled in the last twelve months. Google’s Apps are gaining traction in the small end of the industry but the enterprises are really wedded to the Microsoft platform.

Bauer sees that shift to cloud based services as changing the risk profile for businesses and this is another opportunity for his business.

Email faces a number of challenges as social media and instant messaging apps become preferred communications tools for younger groups while some businesses are banning email.

For the moment though, it looks like the service is safe as companies remain wedded to email as the preferred form of business communication.

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Email remains the most important business tech tool

Email remains the unchallenged king of the workplace

Email remains the most important communications tool for workers observes the Pew Research Project’s survey of technology’s impact on the workplace.

Based on a survey of 1066 US adult internet users last september the survey found nearly two thirds of the working respondents described email as their most important communications tool.

Despite the attempts of some companies to kill email, it seems like the service is as much an important part of business life as ever. Whether it remains so in the future as new generations enter the workforce and social messaging tools become more available is a question we’ll be exploring over the next year.

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ABC Nightlife – killing email

Can we get rid of email? Tony Delroy and Paul Wallbank discuss how we can shrink our inboxes on ABC Nightlife.

For the July 2013 Nightlife spot Tony Delroy and I be looking at email – reduce the volume of email we receive or should we abolish it altogether. Join us from 10pm, July 25 on ABC Local Radio across Australia.

Should you have missed the spot, it’s available for download at the ABC Nightlife website and listener’s questions are answered on our follow up post.

In the United States, the Major League Baseball Commissioner Bud Selig claims he’s never sent an email in his life. While Bud is an older worker with plenty of staff to print out his electronic messages, many of us are looking for ways of getting out from under the daily deluge of messages.

While executives of major sports may be able to get away without using email, most people working in modern organisations can’t. So different companies have introduced different ways of reducing the amount of email flowing around their organisations.

French company Atos is moving to completely ban internal email with CEO Thierry Breton claiming he hasn’t sent an email since 2008. In Australia, Telstra head David Thodey is winning acclaim for his use of enterprise social media service Yammer.

Tony and I will be looking at how all of us can reduce our email load with filters, social media and business collaboration tools. Some of the questions we’ll be covering include;

On the topic of social media and collaboration tools, Salesforce claim some major business benefits from their Chatter app, including thirty one percent of users claiming few meetings which in itself is a major productivity improvement.

We’d love to hear your views so join the conversation with your on-air questions, ideas or comments; phone in on the night on 1300 800 222 within Australia or +61 2 8333 1000 from outside Australia.

Tune in on your local ABC radio station or listen online at www.abc.net.au/nightlife.

You can SMS Nightlife’s talkback on 19922702, or through twitter to @paulwallbank using the #abcnightlife hashtag or visit the Nightlife Facebook page.

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The sport of racing dinosaurs

Bud Selig’s refusal to use email tells us how major sport administrators are insulated from the realities of the modern economy.

The admission from Bud Selig, the US Major League Baseball Commissioner, that he has never used email raised lots of eyebrows around the world.

As Business Insider notes, Selig is 79 years old and there are plenty of other sports administrators challenged by technology so it’s understandable that the commissioner might not see the need to use a technology that became common twenty years ago.

Bud Selig’s story illustrates a much more important issue facing the professional sports industry, that it’s run on an aging business model.

The last fifty years has been very good for professional sport as television and Pay-TV networks bid sporting rights higher across the world.

In most nations, the dominant sport did extremely well as broadcasters fought each other; the Olympics, Soccer leagues in most of the world along with baseball, American football and basketball in the US, Cricket in India, Aussie Rules in Australia, Rugby in South Africa and New Zealand all became incredibly rich.

There weren’t many competitive pressures on the managements of those sport as the dominant sports rarely had any competition, it was a matter of just playing the TV executives off each other.

As a consequence, many sports are run by people with a somewhat exaggerated sense of privilege – they believe it’s their talent, not Rupert Murdoch’s or NBC’s money, that is responsible for their game’s riches.

Bud can dismiss the disbelieving gasps of people in the real economy because for most of his career the only competition he’s had to deal with was from his colleagues has he fought his way to the top job which he won in 1998.

In the real economy, there’s no such luxury. In fact, email may be becoming yesterday’s technology as social media and collaborative tools take over. David Thodey at Telstra and Atos’ Thierry Breton are two leaders in this field.

The danger for sporting organisations is that they are ripe for disruption, so far broadcast media rights have stood up well while revenues in other parts of the entertainment and publishing industries has collapsed. There’s no guarantee though that broadcast sports will remain immune from those changes.

Should disruption come along, even just in the form of sporting rights stagnating, many professional codes will suddenly find inefficiencies like Bud Selig are an expensive luxury.

While Bud’s story is amusing, in reality there’s little the rest of us can learn from how Major League Baseball’s senior executives run their offices.

Image of Bud Selig courtesy of bkabak through Flickr.

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First we kill email, then Powerpoint

French company Atos intends to eliminate email, Powerpoint and meetings from their business. Few organisations are brave enough to follow them.

Two years ago French technology firm Atos raised eyebrows after announcing the company would go email free.

Atos CEO Thierry Breton said at the time,

We are producing data on a massive scale that is fast polluting our working environments and also encroaching into our personal lives. At [Atos] we are taking action now to reverse this trend, just as organizations took measures to reduce environmental pollution after the industrial revolution.

Eighteen months on, the Financial Times reports Thierry is well on the way to eliminate the office pollution that is email. Lee Timmons, one of Atos’ Vice Presidents, tells the paper,

“At the 2012 London Olympics, we were able to zero-email certify some processes – a first – and (we) look set to be email-free internally by the end of 2013,”

Now Atos is looking at eliminating other business distractions, notably Powerpoint presentations and meetings.

Eliminating inboxes, Powerpoint and meetings from the workplace seems a noble cause. Few organisations would be prepared to even consider this.

For many staff and managers, spending hours sorting email, attending pointless meetings and futzing around with over-elaborate Powerpoint presentations is how they justify their time.

It’s going to be interesting to see how Atos goes with thier objective of streamlining the workplace and how many other companies are prepared to copy them.

Man sending an email image courtesy of Bruno-Free at SXC.hu

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The importance of logging off

It’s the simple things that bring us unstuck in the online world.

English Labour MP Tom Watson today learned why logging off your computer is important when his office intern cracked what she thought a joke on his behalf.

What appeared to be a mis-step by the Member of Parliament bought predictable criticism from his enemies in politics and media, particularly given his role as a critic of News International.

The biggest risk in computer security are your staff and co-workers; they have access to your systems and the data saved on them.

In Tom’s case – like most business security breaches – the intern wasn’t being malicious, she was making a very valid point about a serious topic, it was her unfortunate choice of words that caused a problem.

Luckily for her, the boss has taken a mature attitude towards the problem – there’s many bosses who wouldn’t. So the intern seems safe unless the media can beat the story up further.

The moral for all of us is to log off or shut down our computers whenever we step away from them.

If we’re using public terminals in flight lounges, Internet cafes or hotels, then we should make sure we’ve logged out of our email, social media or banking services before the session ends.

Should someone leap on your system when you turn your back, you could find anything from your social media or email account used to send out fake messages about you being robbed through to your online bank balance being pillaged.

We often worry about evil, sophisticated hackers breaking into our accounts but often it’s these simple mistakes that let opportunistic thieves get our details.

Often it’s the simple things that bring us unstuck, so logging off is a good habit to get into. Tom’s intern is right.

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