THE COSTS OF E-MAILING
July 13th, 2008 by Nico Luchsinger
What does an e-mail address cost? Stupid question, you say: Just go to Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail or one of the many other mail services and you’ll know: E-mail addresses are free. For everyone.
But are they? Things might look a little different if you’re a big company. Then, in order to give your employees e-mail addresses, you have to buy servers and licence fees for e-mail software and hire IT and support staff. That, obviously, costs money. But how much exactly? Andrew Fogg wanted to know when he worked for a big British bank. So he did the math, added up all the costs, divided them by the number of e-mails and came up with a figure: 900 British Pounds. Per e-mail address. Per year.
Andrew, who has a BA in philosophy and natural sciences from Cambridge, immediately saw the opportunity and started his own venture, called Kusiri. One of the biggest trends in the internet industry is “cloud computing”: Applications don’t run on desktop computers or company-owned servers, but on the infrastructure that big internet companies such as Google, Amazon or Salesforce have built.
Because these companies can leverage the economics of scale, they are able to provide the same services as in-house solutions much cheaper. The idea of Kusiri, says Andrew, is to “bring these benefits of the consumer web to the enterprise” by building customized solutions on top of the web-based services. With this, he wants to “bridge the gap between the internet and the enterprise” – a gap that is still astonishingly big.
