Make your migration to Office 2010 easy. Office Migration Planning Manager 2010 (OMPM) is available for download from Microsoft. It’s one more tool to add to the SysAdmins’ toolbox.
Continue reading, "Office Migration Planning Manager 2010 Now Available"
Excerpt from an article commissioned by Intermedia and written by MSP Mentor, “Seven Habits of Highly Successful MSPs,” available now on Intermedia web site.
Habit #4: Leverage hosted Exchange sales
As we’ve hinted, services like such as hosted Exchange and hosted SharePoint address specific customer pain points and can help MSPs get the proverbial foot in the door.
Nearly 70% of the world’s top MSPs offer hosted/SaaS email solutions. And 36% offer hosted SharePoint, according to the MSPmentor 100 survey results.
Continue reading, "7 Habits of Highly Successful MSPs: Habit #4"
Two recent articles, one from the Wall Street Journal, “Forbidden Fruit: Microsoft Workers Hide Their iPhones,” and the other from the New York Times, “Apple’s Spat with Google is Getting Personal,” are reminiscent of the atmosphere in Detroit and the rivalry between the big three automotive companies in the US in the 70’s and 80’s as described in Arthur Hailey’s book, Wheels. Interesting to note is that 20 years later the Big Three all lost out to Japanese and Korean companies who weren’t even on their radar at the time.
Apple, Google and Microsoft may be looking down the same road as they focus on battling each other rather than putting their energies toward innovation and user needs.
What do you think?
Intermedia commissioned a new white paper from industry research firm Osterman Research in order to provide additional tools to the marketplace regarding hosted Exchange. The below is part of a series of excerpts from the white paper, “The Case for Hosted Exchange” – available on Intermedia’s web site.
BENEFITS FOR END USERS
While IT can benefit significantly from a hosted Exchange deployment, so can end users. Among the many user benefits associated with the use of hosted Exchange are those discussed below.
A VARIETY OF ACCESS OPTIONS
A hosted Exchange account can be accessed via Microsoft Outlook on Windows, Microsoft Entourage on the Mac, and from any leading Web browser, including Apple Safari. This permits users to access their email, calendar, tasks, address lists, Exchange public folders and other content and data sources from virtually any desktop, laptop, network or other platform. In addition, an Exchange account can also be accessed from any POP or IMAP client, including Yahoo!’s Zimbra Desktop.
Continue reading, "Hosted Exchange Benefits for End User"
The article in last week’s Wall Street Journal, Tech Start-ups Cope with Data Flood, brings up a pressing business problem: the handling of ever increasing volumes of data.
The article’s emphasis is on tech companies that make systems to handle greater amounts of data at a lower cost. This is definitely needed. However, the article misses a larger point – the problem small companies face dealing with disparate sources, types and locations of their data.
Continue reading, "Small Business Data Problem – Web 2.0"
Intermedia commissioned a new white paper from industry research firm Osterman Research in order to provide additional tools to the marketplace regarding hosted Exchange. The below is part of a series of excerpts from the white paper, “The Case for Hosted Exchange” – available on Intermedia’s web site. Click here to read previous excerpt from “The Case for Hosted Exchange”.
Continue reading, "Intermedia: The Case for Hosted Exchange – Part 3"
Intermedia commissioned a new white paper from industry research firm Osterman Research in order to provide additional tools to the marketplace regarding hosted Exchange. The below is part of a series of excerpts from the white paper, “The Case for Hosted Exchange” – available on Intermedia’s web site. Click here to read the first excerpt from “The Case for Hosted Exchange”.
Continue reading, "Intermedia: The Case for Hosted Exchange – Part 2"
Intermedia commissioned a new white paper from industry research firm Osterman Research in order to provide additional tools to the marketplace regarding unified communications. The below is part of a series of excerpts from the white paper, “The Benefits of Unified Communications for SMBs” – available on Intermedia’s web site. Click here to read previous excerpt from “The Benefits of Unified Communications for SMBs”.
The Benefits of Unified Communications
IT BENEFITS
Unified communications typically results in long term cost savings for any organization because both email and telephony – the two most important communications tools – can be managed as a single entity, and because hardware and software costs are typically reduced. This leads to greater efficiencies in the use of IT staff time and lower labor costs, not to mention substantially hardware and software costs. However, an added benefit is that some portion of IT staff time is freed for other tasks or initiatives that can provide greater value to a company. However, using a hosted model for unified communications can yield even greater benefits, particularly for smaller organizations. Because hosted services are generally less expensive than deploying and managing on-premise systems, a hosted unified communications system can result in significant cost savings. The cost savings will typically be greater a) the smaller the organization is and b) the more geographically distributed it is.
END USER AND BUSINESS BENEFITS
Why does unified communications offer a better experience for end users and IT alike? There are several benefits that employees and employers alike can realize:
1 Gartner, Inc. “Dataquest Insight: Teleworking, The Quiet Revolution (2007 Update)” by Caroline Jones, May 14, 2007
You can download white paper “The Benefits of Unified Communications for SMBs” from our site
Intermedia makes Exchange 2010 available to channel, adds new partners
Philbert Shih
Intermedia has extended the hosted Exchange 2010 service to its reseller channel. With Intermedia early to the market with 2010, its resellers will get a nice head start on the competition, enabling them to capture customers that have been waiting for Exchange 2010 and are either ready to adopt hosted Exchange now that the new version is out or make the upgrade. With another iteration of Exchange on the market, Intermedia is set to capitalize on a wider market opportunity.
Intermedia’s reach into the market includes a disclosed 4,000 reseller partners ranging from newest partner Ingram Micro to much smaller IT shops, service providers and hosters. The company recently secured partners in the emerging Latin American market, adding Columbia’s Solosoft, a systems integrator, and Venezuela’s Soto Networks, a managed services provider. Soto Networks signed on a 1,000-seat account shortly after becoming a partner.
Intermedia’s Exchange 2010 business comes with a data protection guarantee powered by its own proprietary technology, DataEcho. With DataEcho, customer data is replicated in real time within the datacenter that the customer is hosted in, while also being replicated over the network to another datacenter in a separate geographical location (Intermedia has four datacenters across California and New York). With the data protection, Intermedia is able to deliver disaster recovery services to customers and make for a nice marketing angle that can and should be monetized.
Intermedia continues to push forward in the hosted Exchange market, which has been under pressure through this recession as businesses cut back employees and freeze hiring with the implications this has for mailboxes. However, the hosted Exchange (and hosted email) sector as a whole has performed admirably as organizations continue to see the logic in moving on-premise Exchange servers into third-party datacenters. It makes too much sense from a cost, performance and efficiency perspective, while allowing customers to easily and affordably consume value-added services like archiving, security and disaster recovery. These facts have helped offset customer churn created by the economic environment and kept growth moving in a positive direction.
Interesting articles in the news today:
Channel Insider — What IT Leaders are Whispering in Budget Meetings: IT organizations slimmed down their spending in 2009, but are looking to make some strategic IT investments in 2010. What characterizes these investments is that they will provide some cost-cutting or other value to the overall business, according to a new survey conducted by the Economist Intelligence Unit and commissioned by Accenture. Here’s an inside look at what’s going on inside IT organization budget meetings as IT leaders look ahead to next year’s strategic initiatives…
Redmond Channel Partner — Partner Hosting Still Has a Future: Long the subject of benign neglect, the Services Provider License Agreement has been rejuvenated in the last year with significant program changes.