Total cost of ownership (TCO), in fact, ranks quite low among the factors influencing corporate mail migration strategies, according to a telephone survey of 200 businesses conducted jointly by Network Computing and sister publication InformationWeek. Only 25 percent of the businesses surveyed said they had evaluated or were evaluating TCO before consolidating on a mail system, while a mere 12 percent said they had considered ROI (return on investment).

The problem with such offhand treatment of cost factors is that messaging isn't a minor productivity application anymore. For many businesses, it's become the lifeblood, the applications platform, the revenue generator, the knowledge store. And the hardware/software expenses behind the huge investments in next-generation systems are nothing compared to their total cost of ownership--$10 million annually for a 3,000-client system, in one respected analysis.

Nevertheless, messaging TCO analysis is an unpopular undertaking. It involves architectural and organizational evaluation that is as daunting and tedious as it is critical. The cost and value of messaging tends to be deeply buried and obscured in most organizations--it's in the expense for multiservice help desks, burgeoning bandwidth requirements, downtime statistics, part-time administrators, software development, migration hardware and software, storage servers and ongoing training. It's hidden in the hard-to-assess value inherent in knowledge management, travel savings and personal productivity. What's more, research houses cloud the issue with studies that add a metric here or delete one there, giving each of the major messaging contenders enough fodder to declare itself TCO king.

Still, there are decided advantages for the businesses that tackle TCO. Take Exxon Corp., which cut its annual per-seat mainframe PROFS mail costs from $600 to less than $200 in its move to Exchange. Or Digital Equipment Corp., which more than halved its full-time messaging administrative staff and freed up even more part-time administrators when it, too, adopted Exchange. Or the major accounting firm that runs more than 1,000 homegrown and other applications on its 110,000-client Lotus system. Or U S West, with its fire sale-like, three-year annualized TCO of $92 per client for Netscape (plus individually cost-justified Lotus Notes application deployments).

"Users are remiss in this area because it's not always easy, and there's a lot of product bigotry involved," says Barbara Bauer, senior director for corporate systems development at U S West. Bauer says her conversations with peers deploying new mail systems at other businesses showed that ROI data typically was neither required nor available. Most companies made their choices by executive decision, rather than building a business case.

Without TCO and ROI, users lack a model for line-item costs, Bauer says. And without that model, it's very difficult to calculate how dollars can be saved or where they are best spent.