Microsoft today launched Exchange Server 2003, the latest edition of its messaging and collaboration suite.

The company claimed that, in the four months since it released the offering to manufacturing, it can show that upgrading from Exchange 5.5 can cut operational costs by approximately 50 per cent.

Microsoft said that savings related to server administration, hardware and software could be made "in specific enterprise deployment scenarios".

It also cited a study from analyst Meta Group which looked at the potential savings a company could achieve by migrating from Exchange 5.5 to Exchange 2003 with a focus on operational costs.

The research claimed that a 45,000-user enterprise could generate about $600,000 in total annual operational savings.

The savings are based on the elimination of 54 per cent of an enterprise's servers and an additional 51 per cent saving in server management, administration and maintenance costs, mainly through site consolidation.

Microsoft claimed that such reductions are possible with the enhancements in Exchange 2003 and Outlook 2003. These include:

The complete Exchange Ownership cost study is available here.

According to the software giant, since Exchange 2003 was released to manufacturing, over 330,000 user seats have been deployed and more than 200 customers in the early adopter programmes are in the process of migrating to the product.