I live in a world where I expect and need email access from anywhere, any computer, any mobile device. I also expect tight integration with calendar and contact

I live in a world where I expect and need email access from anywhere, any computer, any mobile device. I also expect tight integration with calendar and contacts. Those requirements mean I need webmail and ActiveSync. IMAP Idle (push) has reasonable mobile support, but CalDAV and CardDAV have limited support -- so ActiveSync it is. ActiveSync is non-existent in open source software. The best webmail client I've used that can be used with any IMAP server is Roundcube, but it doesn't have calendar support. Zimbra is the only open source software I've seen with good mail+calendar+contact integration, and it has a good web client. Perfect, except the open source version doesn't support ActiveSync, and is missing the backup utilities. The commercial version is a minimum $399/year. Fine, I'll pay it. Now I need to host it. I want my email to be highly available. So I want to cluster two Zimbra servers in one data center, and cluster two backup MXs in another data center to store and forward my mail if the Zimbra DC drops off the net. Zimbra supports HA clustering with Red Hat Cluster Suite or through the HA clustering of virtualization like VMware. RHCS requires a highly available SAN as backend. Damn, an HA SAN is going to be expensive. Maybe I'll do VMs. But virtualization products like VMware and RHEV will require an HA SAN or NAS. Fine, I'll build an HA NAS with open source. I'll deploy two ZFS heads in an active-active cluster... wait, clustering will require purchasing licenses from a company like Nexenta. Or I can get active-passive from iXsystems. So I'll buy the cheapest Nexenta license which is $1725, plus the HA Cluster license for $4900. I'll connect those heads to a dual-controller SAS JBOD which only costs $3795. I'm now going to fly all this gear to a non-US-friendly location to install it in a data center. Each piece of hardware as redundant power supplies. I will connect the power supplies to separate power distribution units, the PDUs are on separate circuits. Each system has dual Ethernet going to separate switches, which in-turn uplink to dual-clustered routers, which uplink to the multi-homed internet provided by the data center. Because I'm on the other side of the world I'll also have a console server, and the PDUs can remotely cycle power. Awesome! I now have the email setup I want, and it only cost me $30,000 and a month of my time! Or I can sign up for Google Apps, where they will host my domain's email, and provide all the features I want, and have a better interface, and not require maintenance, and have better uptime, all for free! I've administered old school sendmail+procmail setups without webmail. I've administered Postfix+Dovecot+Roundcube+LDAP. I've administered Zimbra. I've administered Google Apps for Business. It isn't worth my time and money to do anything other than Google Apps.