Microsoft's Exchange Team in Redmond has released Exchange 2010 to manufacturing. As reported by John Fontana, there are already over 5 million production users running on Exchange 2010.
Exchange 2010 takes on several existing markets. Email archiving vendors will feel the impact of native archiving capabilities. SAN vendors will feel the hit from native support for low-cost storage. And geoclustering vendors will be impacted by mailbox replication technologies now in the box.
The most significant change is that Exchange 2010 facilitates cloud services. Web-based self service capabilities, high availability, and deeper web services support all enable Exchange in the cloud.
The big question is whether Exchange 2010 will see a spike in adoption. Exchange 2007 deployments have been less than stellar.
Hats go off to the Exchange team on this major release.