<p>When one thinks about Dell, most times it's about the company's hardware business. But, Dell has made some significant investments in acquisitions over the past 5 years. Quest Software was acquired by Dell in September of 2012. The Quest acquisition brought a full portfolio of valuable software assets to Dell. With Dell becoming a private company, I expect to see more and more focus on the software business.</p><p>I recently had the opportunity to have a chat with Michael Tweddle, senior director, product management, with Dell Software about the state of corporate email. Our discussion was centered on a recent survey, sponsored by Dell and released by Dimensional Research. The survey results were gleaned from 202 IT Pros that work in companies with 1,000 employees or more.</p><p>Some of the survey results were unexpected, but the overall results show that email is still a highly critical part of the business. 71% surveyed described email as mission critical and 81% described email as the most important tool for employee communication. And, since it's still one of the most critical communication and collaboration vehicles in business, tampering with what works is slowing Cloud adoption. A whopping 86% stated that email is still being hosted on-premise, though 51% of those suggest that they are considering Cloud options.</p><p>Per the survey, the most important reason why Cloud email adoption is slow, is due to customers concerned about data loss, followed by loss of control, and then security. The majority of email users still utilize their company email as the primary resource for storing corporate data. In a world where Dropbox, SkyDrive (soon to be OneDrive), and others, are on display constantly in the media as popular Cloud storage services, apparently those services still sit far behind email for storage.</p><p><a href="http://windowsitpro.com/exchange-server/state-corporate-email-and-cloud">Keep reading...</a></p>