Rackspace Email & Apps Blog

Philosophy is important. It changes history because big ideas lead to big actions. Some of the most transformative political movements in history started as a purely philosophical project.

The closest thing to philosophy in business is a company’s mission statement. These statements lay out a vision of what the company wants to be, not just what it is. One can use a firm’s mission statement to learn about the company and its competencies beyond what’s contained in its product offering.

Flying high?

Compare the mission statements of Delta and Southwest Airlines. First Delta:

We—Delta’s employees, customers, and community partners—together form a force for positive local and global change, dedicated to bettering standards of living and the environment where we and our customers live and work. We are Delta’s Force for Global Good.

Now Southwest:

The mission of Southwest Airlines is dedication to the highest quality of Customer Service delivered with a sense of warmth, friendliness, individual pride, and Company Spirit.

Everyone knows that Southwest is widely regarded as a great U.S. airline; Delta is not. Could one deduce this from their mission statements? Of course! What the heck does “bettering standards of living and the environment” have to do with an airline? In short, nothing. It’s a noble goal and I applaud any company that embraces social responsibility among their goals. But as the central theme of their mission? How does that win customers and build enterprise value? This mission statement shows a lack of focus that might partially explain why Delta is in the financial trouble it is.

Southwest’s mission on the other hand is clear, to the point and makes sense in the context of their industry. One normally does not think of low-cost carriers as great service companies, but Southwest’s “disruptive technology” was service—so focusing on that element, rather than simply on cost or speed of service is reasonable, and differentiating.

Try before you buy

The take-away from this brief comparison is that, as a customer, an easy way to “try before you buy” is to look at the company’s mission statement. Does the statement provide a clear picture of how the business creates value? If the company does everything it says it will do, will you win? If the answer to these questions is not “yes,” then you may need to think about going with a different company. When the philosophy is not compelling, can you expect big actions are a result?

At Rackspace, we take philosophy seriously. It’s a part of everything we do here and drives our decision making process every day. So what’s our mission here at Rackspace? To state it simply — our mission is to be recognized as one of the world’s greatest service companies.

Learn more about how we are delivering on our mission at Rackspace.

We’re always looking for ways to make it easier for businesses to move into the cloud. That’s why we’re proud to announce our new do-it-yourself Migration App.

With the Migration App, customers can copy their email data from their previous email servers to our Rackspace Email or Microsoft Exchange messaging platforms. The Migration App is located in the customer Control Panel and is completely self-service, walking the customer through the process step-by-step.

Here are some highlights:

• Migrate from your own internal email servers or from other hosted servers.
• Migrate from Exchange servers and POP/IMAP servers. We’ve even added settings for popular email services that we see customers migrating from, such as GoDaddy.
• Create multiple migrations, including customized migrations for specifics sets of mailboxes.
• Schedule your migration for a date and time that work best for you.
• When the migration begins, email data will begin transferring automatically, without any additional effort on your part.
• View migration progress online and receive email alerts.
• Save migration details, so that you can review the migration report at any time.

Our Migration App will guide you through the process and includes helpful information along the way. And, of course, our Fanatical Support® team is here 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, if you need any help.

Please note, if your business has advanced requirements that require a manual migration, our dedicated transition team can build a custom migration plan and manage the entire process for you. Please contact us to learn more.

Want to get started?

For current customers, the Migration App can be accessed within our Control Panel, under Domains -> Tools -> Migrations.

If you are not a current customer, what are you waiting for? Isn’t it time for your business to get in the cloud?

Congratulations Google from all of us at Rackspace. Los Angeles, California is going with Google Apps for its new city-wide email solution. This is a big win for you and for Los Angeles.

We’re your competitor. We believe that we beat you on price and on service. But on the point that moving email and apps to the cloud makes sense for huge numbers of customers, we couldn’t agree with you more. When customers get in the cloud, they save money and work smarter. Whether they’re looking for the power of Microsoft Exchange without the headache of managing it or great web-based POP and IMAP, email hosting frees customers up to focus on their core competencies. Whether we call it Going Google or getting in the cloud, the point is the same. The future of email is cloud-based and we’re happy that you’re right along with us helping customers get there.

Google has recently conducted a study that confirms what we are seeing in the marketplace. More and more companies are moving to the cloud, even as cost is cited as a barrier by those resistant to change:

“Cost or budget issues were the primary factor reported as a barrier to adoption.”

Reviewing Google’s study, readers will quickly learn that those who have moved to the cloud cite value as one of the key benefits, including cost savings:

“Benefits to using cloud apps include value, availability, convenience, consistency across locations, better service, reliability, and simplicity of updates/maintenance.”

This apparent contradiction is a classic example of human nature’s ability to stick with the status quo well beyond its usefulness. And for this reason we consider the 1.4 million mailboxes we host as merely the tip of the iceberg.

Once upon a time factories produced their own electricity. Very few have the need to do so in modern times. Get in the cloud and start the next chapter in your company’s life.

We’ve been arguing for a while now on our blog that for SMBs (small to medium sized businesses), moving your email to the cloud is a good idea. It saves money, helps make IT staff more productive, and increases reliability in general for the businesses that drive our economy. But we want to help you move your email to the cloud, so we would think that, right?

Well Gartner agrees: the cost savings of email in the cloud are very real. In a presentation this week at the Gartner Symposium IT Expo, analysts Matthew Cain and James Lundy argue that by 2012, cloud email will cost over 50% less than the in-house alternative. And for storage costs, the savings will be even more dramatic: cost in the cloud is predicted to be 85% less than in-house.

Source: ZDNet

For small businesses who are leading the charge toward 20% of all email seats being in the cloud by 2012, this is huge. Better email cheaper. Simple, and powerful, as that.

With the smell of freshly brewed coffee in the air, I open up Microsoft Outlook and head straight to my calendar to start scheduling meetings. Being a technical project manager, part of my job includes scheduling meetings—and in any given session, I easily schedule 5+ meetings for 15+ folks.

When scheduling a meeting, it is, of course, important to find a time when everyone can meet. Microsoft Exchange customers are already familiar with using Outlook to schedule a meeting based on others’ schedules. But, did you know that Rackspace Email customers can use Outlook to do that, too?

With Sync for Outlook, I can easily sync my co-workers’ 65+ calendars, adding them to my Outlook. And because I use Automatic Sync, I don’t even need to push a button—it automatically syncs the data in the background, so I can go on with my work. Since my Outlook calendar data is kept up-to-date, I’m always ready whenever I need to schedule a meeting that will work for everyone.

We are always interested in talking to IT professionals about their business IT needs and how they provide solutions for their business users. We want to learn how we can continue to develop valuable services that are relevant to the needs of businesses today and the IT staffs that support them. That’s why, during the week of October 19-23, I will be at the Gartner Symposium IT Expo in Orlando, FL and SpiceWorld 2009 in Austin, TX (Hosted by Spiceworks) representing Rackspace Email & Apps.

Are you going to be there, too? Let me know in the comments, email me at tom.thaddeus [at] rackspace.com or stop by and see me when you’re there (that’s me in that picture above). I want to talk to you.

As companies continue to need to lay off workers, the workload for the remaining lucky few has increased markedly. The recession is forcing us all to work smarter and faster, and IT is the natural place for businesses to look for ways to make that happen. It’s no surprise then that average hours worked per week for IT professionals are on the rise and that lives outside of work are suffering. According to a recent poll conducted by The IT Job Board, a full two-thirds of IT professionals feel that these long hours negatively affect their personal lives. Oh, and on the job performance is going down, too (34% of respondents believe that their productivity at work had decreased due to long hours).

In light of this gloomy situation, why not cut costs and increase morale? If you aren’t already, maybe it’s time to look at hosting for your business. If you are currently hosting with us, why not tell a friend what a winning proposition it is to free up precious IT hours to focus on core business objectives. Email Hosting saves significant money while freeing up IT staff to focus on core business problems, not routine maintenance, server upgrades, and service patch installs. We take care of all that, leaving tech-savvy employees to add value where it makes the biggest impact on the business. And, of course, if they can make it to that 6pm Happy Hour, we’ll all be the better for it.

Our CTO, Bill Boebel, is pretty damn busy. He runs from meeting to meeting with a laptop, a notepad, pens and his BlackBerry. Yet, somehow, his thoughts are rarely all in one place (shocking). So for Bill, and the millions of other super-busy people, we’ve created Notes!

Notes is a new app now included with our Rackspace Webmail client. It’s the perfect place to store a new idea, a meeting summary or just some quick thoughts. Combine Notes with our Webmail, Calendar, Tasks and Contacts and you have a full-featured, productivity suite!

Notes is easy to find and even easier to use. Rackspace Email customers can log-in to their Webmail account and find Notes under the Notes tab. A welcome message and instructions await you there…

Using Notes with Sync for BlackBerry. Now it gets Interesting…
One of the best features of our new Notes app is actually not found in Notes at all. It’s part of our Sync for BlackBerry tool; which allows Bill to create, edit and access Webmail Notes, while he’s on the go, from his mobile. Here’s how it works:

Steven Ng, Vice President of Professional Services for Acumetrics came to Rackspace after a hard drive failure took their email down for a week and reallocated Steven’s time from billable work to fixing email. Due to a failed backup, they also lost a week’s worth of email. By outsourcing their email to Rackspace, they now have dedicated support when they have email issues from our team of email experts.

According to Steven, “We lost enough time and money from one outage to pay for Rackspace hosting service for a year.” When they experienced a recent outage, they reviewed our resolution report and determined, “that issue would have taken us hours to diagnose and even longer to fix.” Outsourcing allows Steven to focus on growing their business while we worry about making sure his email is operational.

According to a report by Osterman Research there’s a 72% chance you’ll experience an unplanned email outage this year per. With each outage, businesses can expect an average of 62 hours of downtime. The report also shows that 41% of unplanned outages are due to technological issues: software configuration errors, outdated drives, or HVAC issues. Hardware failures alone accounted for over a quarter of unplanned outages. Even a short outage can have long-term consequence, like missing important customer communication, total loss of email data, and lost productivity.

With all the things that can go wrong with email, putting it in the hands of email experts makes sense. Rackspace’s email infrastructure is built on a redundant, clustered server environment with automatic failover measures.