Leader: In or out of house?

In IT we're used to the debate about doing something yourself in-house or letting others handle it for you, the latter often going by buzzwords such as 'on-demand' or 'hosted'.

The trend in recent years, it would be fair to say, has been to increasingly rely on third-parties operating online, even over the public internet.

It used to be that we couldn't trust networks to be up enough to allow meaningful use of applications such as CRM.

But that's changed. Airline BA, for example, started to use on-demand CRM vendor RightNow for engaging with customers over its website. It was no coincidence that online ordering started to take off after early successes had gone to the likes of easyJet.

When this publication asked whether response times on BA.com were slower than if BA were hosting that aspect of its service itself, we were told that actually the on-demand system was faster. Both bandwidth and the efficiency of the software had reached the necessary levels.

So the war was won, right? Well not quite. This week numerous news sources covered the outages to RIM's BlackBerry services, mainly affecting users in North America and some parts of Asia. (A few UK users were hit too but only those with email routed through those regions.)

silicon.com was among the first to cover this story and we knew early on that there would be repercussions, not least to the reputation of the BlackBerry. Today a press release from one company peddling an on-premise email solution carried the line: "Most IT organisations would not consider completely outsourcing a mission-critical application to a third party. Why should email be any different?"

Why indeed? Only a few years ago, we had various people - Scott McNealy of Sun comes to mind, never a friend of an Exchange server - asking why we wouldn't all just use webmail and lose some headcount from IT departments across the world.

In recent times, Gmail is usually touted as the answer. Surely Google is better at securely holding and transmitting data than the average user-organisation?

Some would have said the same about BlackBerry services.

While the idea of thousands of executives pulling their hair out as their mobile email device of choice for once stops vibrating and flashing is funny to some of us, it shows us all that there is no single answer.

Every user-organisation can screw up IT. Those who take it off our hands might be more reliable - but when they do come a cropper it is often so much more spectacular.