If you delve into those old marketing textbooks from college, you'll find a term called "Category Killer" in them.  Of course, nowadays, who needs a textbook?  We have Wikipedia to define the term for us:  "Category killer is a term used in marketing and strategic management to describe a product, service, brand or company that has such a distinct sustainable competitive advantage that competing firms find it almost impossible to operate profitably in that industry."  (Wow.  Someday, I'll have to tell my kids about the old days, when a door-to-door encyclopedia salesperson could sell fourteen volumes worth of that kind of free, perishable info for over $200.)

If I had a huge readership, it would be bold for me to say that email marketing hardware appliances are a Category Killer.  However, I'm probably just preaching to the choir here, so I'm not all that bold  ; ) 

Don't get me wrong, I love the ASP model for email marketing.  Most of our low to medium volume customers use our ASP...it's great, reliable, and requires almost no ramp-up time.  However, if you're deploying more than 2,500,000 messages per month and you're using an ASP, I have some beautiful oceanfront property in Arizona for you (and I'll throw the Golden Gate Bridge in for free).  Do you enjoy paying monthly metered rates for your loyalty marketing programs?  Perhaps you have an affinity for those huge online marketing bills that eat into your holiday profits each January?  Maybe you believe in that myth about deliverability differences between ASP's and installed solutions?  If so, I'm going to have to charge you more for that oceanfront property...it's even more beautiful than it was before.

In January one of the members of my team, Justin Foster, blogged about the differences between ASP's and email appliances.  Simply put, here's the main difference:

The email appliance is the same exact solution without the metered monthly rates.  It's not a software solution with a messy implementation and constant maintenance.  It's a pre-configured hardware appliance with the ASP loaded on to it.  It's a no-brainer in a box.

It's funny to watch competitors lob weak serves to online marketers about the "benefits of ASP's for high-volume programs."  Every point is generally erroneous.  There are a lot of myths out there...so let me break it down for you:

• Yes, unique whitelisted IP addresses can be configured for an appliance.  How do you think an ASP works?  Same thing...different data center.
• Yes, feedback loops can be joined with major Internet Service Providers.  You think the ISP cares where the server is hosted?  Its the messages coming out of the server that they care about.
• Yes, all other aspects of deliverability can be managed.  Once again, same thing as an ASP.
• No, it's not difficult to install a pre-configured appliance.  Yes, it requires a little I.T. involvement, which can be provided by the customer or the email service provider.
• No, the use of polls, surveys, subscription forms, cancelation forms, subscriber profile management forms, blogs, RSS, etc are not affected by the use of an appliance. 
• No, reporting is not any different.  Why would it be?  Is the tracking tag different with an ASP?  No.
• No, the disk space usage for the storage of content, reporting, etc is not a problem.  This is an insanely ridiculous point.  With an ASP, you're sharing servers with other customers.  With an appliance, you have a lot more disk space because you have your own appliance.
• No, the deployment speed isn't slower.  It's actually much faster.  The appliance has its own message transfer agent on it...depending on the appliance they choose, some customers are able to do 1,500,000 messages an hour.  Customers with more than one appliance can load-balance their network to reach multiples of that number.  Try sending 5,000,000 - 10,000,000 messages an hour with your ASP.  Do you even have a need for that kind of volume?  If you're not Yahoo or you're not spamming people about vi.ag.ra, I'm sure you'd be fine with just one or two appliances (and maybe a redundant hot-spare).

I could go on and on, but the point is...for volumes above 2,500,000 per month, email appliances are a Category Killer.  With the financing that we offer through our banking partners, email appliances become a Category Killer at the 300,000 per month level.  It makes absolutely no sense to use an ASP solution above a certain volume!