Electronic Mail Doesn’t Get Stamp of Approval : Problems With Delivery Prompt Push for Compatible Industry Standards
The Quaker Oats Co. isn’t quite sure how many electronic mail systems it has. Perhaps as many as two dozen are scattered around the $5-billion company’s offices and facilities, most of them small networks that allow people in one division to communicate electronically with each other, but not necessarily with fellow workers down the hall.
Electronic mail, also known as “E-mail,” made its first appearance at the food and toy company in 1986 and has since proliferated fast. In general, that has not been due to any grand scheme devised by headquarters. Rather, the company prefers that local departments adopt it on their own as they see the need, and more and more do.
Quaker Oats’ experience sums up pretty well what is happening in U.S. companies in general concerning electronic mail, which sends messages electronically from computer to computer. It is growing fast and becoming a standard business tool, especially in large institutions. But there is no master plan. Rather than one big network that everyone can use, it has developed as a lot of small, closed systems.
As happened with personal computers a decade ago, U.S. companies have spent heavily on this technology and now are growing frustrated that network “A” doesn’t connect with network “B”. A push for standards is on, and the electronic mail industry is responding, starting to tie incompatible networks together.
To use electronic mail, a person signs on to a computer and types in a message. Tagged with an electronic address, the message is then sent across wires to a “mailbox,” a point in a computer’s circuitry where it is stored to await the perusal of the person to whom the message was sent.
North America now has about 6 million mailboxes in operation, according to the Washington-based Electronic Mail Assn. About 70% are on networks that tie together the offices of individual companies. The rest are on “public systems,” such as Western Union’s EasyLink, which allow people to communicate with anyone else with a mailbox in that system.
Revenues in the electronic mail marketplace rose about 28% in 1988 to $574 million, according to International Resource Development Inc., a New Canaan, Conn., research firm that follows the electronic mail industry.
The proliferation of electronic mail has moved many U.S. companies away from such traditional means of communications as mail, phone and telex. Increasingly, employees use electronic mail to transfer reports, sales information, graphics and charts, not to mention personal messages between workers.
Cost is a driving force: Electronic mail within a company’s own computer network may cost next to nothing, and on international services its rates run half or less those of telex. Shell Oil Co., for instance, uses about 23,000 boxes on two networks in the United States and figures that it is saving about $100 per month per box. “Both of these systems are very good investments for Shell,” said Norman Altstedter, a company spokesman.
More and more, electronic mail is being integrated into other forms of office information technology, such as personal computers and facsimile machines. Many electronic mail systems now have software that allow messages to cross over to the facsimile medium. Banks have begun using E-mail to send letters of credit; auto dealerships to order parts.
Boon to Washington Area
The goal, said Kenneth Murphy, messaging product manager at GE Information Services Co. of Rockville, Md., is to revolutionize “the ability of business to get business done.”
The growth in electronic mail means a boon for the Washington area’s information economy because many of the mail industry’s major players have their headquarters here: Telenet Communications Corp., Dialcom Inc., MCI Communications Corp., GE Information Services, the Source, and Quantum Computer Services Inc.
The explosion of the fax market could put a drag on electronic mail’s growth. But analysts generally expect further growth because more businesses are viewing it as a significant competitive tool, prices are dropping and telephone companies have received permission to market E-mail to homes and small businesses.
By tradition, the companies that operate public electronic mail networks have used incompatible technical standards, making it impossible, for instance, for a user of MCI’s network to talk to one on GE’s. Today, corporate users, as they find electronic mail more and more important internally, are lobbying for change, so that they can connect to other firms.
Last December, the Aerospace Industries Assn., whose member companies have come to use electronic mail heavily to coordinate contracts and research, met with electronic mail company representatives at GE Information Services’ offices, to voice their interest in interconnection.
That gathering has led to important new work using an interconnection standard known as X.400, which the industry worldwide agreed on in basic form in 1984. This spring, electronic mail providers have been patching together test links between nine of the aerospace companies, using X.400. It is a tedious process--in an extreme case, getting a message from one aerospace company to another means traveling through the circuits of seven different national electronic mail networks.
The federal government, meanwhile, has provided another push toward adoption of the standard. Under its planned FTS-2000 telecommunications network, the systems of its electronic mail contractors--AT&T;, Dialcom and Telenet--must function as one and the same, linking federal offices nationwide.
On April 1, another milestone was passed when Dialcom and AT&T; became the first to connect their public networks using X.400. The standard is also being used to tie together incompatible systems within single companies and to link American electronic mail into networks abroad. No one expects integration to take place in the wink of an eye, however.
Outside the industry, analysts see electronic mail companies still wanting to hang onto their proprietary standards. Inside it, executives point out that closed systems have tended to develop in part because people want to communicate mainly with a select group of people. John Morris, president of Dialcom, compares today’s situation to hundreds of islands, on which people can talk together on the same island but are cut off from those across the water. “The question is how many of those islands really want to talk to each other at this stage,” he said.
