Business reasons for using Kerio Connect

Aaron Benedict has over 15 years of experience in the messaging and security fields and most recently was the Northeast Channel Manager for Kerio Technologies. He has a bachelor's degree in Jewish History and while he is not riding his bike, he enjoys reading American History.

http://aaron.benedictfamily.org

I know that Tony has spoken about Kerio Connect before but I thought that I would take the discussion away from the technical aspects of the software and focus on the business side of things. I know that this is mainly a technical blog but I come from more of the business side of things. For those of you that have clients or are pitching Kerio to new clients, these are some good pointers to help get the message across to the non technical decision makers.

Return on investment

There are a lot of options out there for having your email hosted by a third party. However. The majority of them limit you to how much storage you can have (usually that is 2GB per mailbox) and purchasing additional space will cost you extra. Not only that but when you consider your paying on average about $7 per user per month the annual cost starts to add up quite quickly, especially when you have 5 or more people.

However, Kerio Connect starts at $540 (with anti-virus) for 5 users. That is for the first year. The second year of software maintence is roughly 30% of your initial cost. The savings that you'll see will make your accountant very, very happy.

Installs Anywhere

If you wanted to you could run an SBS server so you can use Microsoft Exchange however, it is going to cost you. It's going to cost you purchasing new hardware (at least one server) and also additional software. If you compare that with what you need to install Kerio Connect, it's almost like comparing apples and oranges. Not only are the hardware specifications a lot lower (due to Connect's low overhead) but you don't even need to install it on a server operating system. A plain old client operating is all you need. Not only that but you aren't tied to just one operating system. You can install it on Mac, Linux or Windows and if you are so inclined there is even a VMWare appliance if you work in virtualized environments.

Any Client, Open Standards

One of the things that I have always liked about Connect is the fact that you can use any mail client on any OS. From Outlook to Mail.app and anywhere in-between. The secret for a lot of this is Connect's use of open standards. Using IMAP for mail, CalDav for calendars and CardDav for contacts allows any other client what supports those open standards to connect to Connect and start sharing calendars and contacts in the office. Even though Outlook supports IMAP it doesn't support CalDav or CardDav, don't fear. There is a connector for Outlook which will mimic the MAPI connection that Outlook has with Exchange so it works just like you'd expect Outlook to work (for good or bad - I'll leave that to your discretion).

There you have it, several business reason why your clients should choose Kerio Connect.

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