CHRISTMAS GREETINGS TO MAIL MELTDOWN

Added: (Tue Dec 12 2000)

Pressbox (Press Release) - PRESS RELEASE FROM OUTRADE.COM

12 December 2000

CHRISTMAS GREETINGS TO MAIL MELTDOWN

Christmas could herald a digital logjam according to Outrade.com, the managed messaging specialists. The company predicts that some internet service providers (ISPs) will not have the capacity to cope with a deluge of e-mails - many of them carrying large digital pictures - during the festive season.

Despite business use declining during the Christmas and New Year period, Outrade.com predicts that daily e-mail traffic will increase due to people using the web to keep in touch with friends and relatives, send electronic cards and send photographs using digital cameras received as presents.


Outrade.com reports that such ‘seasonal overload’ recently struck Verizon Online during Thanksgiving in America. Its system crashed due to more than 1 million e-mails hitting its 200,000 customer base in one day. Although technicians managed to make necessary repairs by the following day, a further barrage of e-mails was waiting in queue only to cripple the system once again. This left users without an e-mail service for three days.

The unpredictable growth in e-mail is the root of this type of capacity problem. Currently over 2.1 billion e-mails are sent globally each day and these are carrying bigger and bigger attachments. All agree this figure is growing fast – it is expected to reach 7.9 billion by 2002 - but individual ISPs are finding it hard to predict what level of demand they will face. With already tight margins and unmetered access becoming a reality, some companies are re-examining the economies of e-mail provision and ISPs are reluctant to invest heavily in anticipation of an unpredictable and seasonal consumer demand.

The difficulty of their task is exacerbated by the rapid rise in digital consumer technologies. By the end of 2000, global sales of digital cameras are expected to reach 8 million units and Lehman Brothers predict a massive peak in sales over the Christmas period.

With estimates for growth in digital camera sales during the next twelve months ranging from 30%-50%, and consumer use of e-mail changing so quickly, few ISPs can gauge demand. Many have invested heavily in anticipation of future traffic, while others are simply hoping they will cope with the Christmas rush.

Keith Bellamy, managing director of Outrade.com UK, explains how their dilemma is part of a wider problem:

"ISPs face an unenviable task. Consumer e-mail and digital cameras are both still evolving mass markets. So no one knows how consumers will combine the technologies at Christmas. Does an ISP gear up its capacity and therefore tie up huge amounts of capital which it would like to devote to developing the revenue generating side of its business, or does it operate with a minimal capacity buffer and risk its service standards dropping?"

Keen to avoid this dilemma, many ISPs in the UK are likely to follow their US counterparts and outsource their email management with companies such as Outrade.com. By offering a fully scalable service, which can begin with a few mailboxes and quickly build up to millions, an ISP can use Outrade.com to build-in capacity without tying up funds.

Keith Bellamy concludes:

"The Christmas problem raises a far broader issue of cost-effective capacity. It’s a fair assumption that if you are one of the millions of consumers given a digital camera you are going to use it and that means a large number of large files all hitting the system at once. ISPs need to be able to cope with such one-off peaks without crippling their businesses in the process – which is one of many reasons why outsourcing e-mail is set to increase."

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Further information contact: Tammy Deacon, Findlay-Wilson PR

T: 01993 823011 Email: tammy@findlay-wilson.co.uk


About Outrade.com

Outrade.com is a European company with operational subsidiaries in France and the UK focusing on messaging system management. A further six operating subsidiaries will be established across Europe during 2001.


It provides messaging system management and administration, e-mail, web-mail, voice-mail, SMS, fax-mail and WAP-mail for multinational, private sector, dotcom and internet technology-based companies and the public sector.

Outrade.com partners include HP (hardware platforms, integration and support), Openwave Systems Inc (recently formed when Software.com and Phone.com united creating the world’s leading provider of open internet-based software for communication service providers) and Deloitte & Touche (strategic consultancy and business development).