Intermedia provides the premier Exchange hosting experience for small- and medium-sized businesses. The company combines premium-level Microsoft Exchange with proprietary infrastructure technology to make it easy for businesses to set-up, manage and secure their email. Intermedia enables managed service providers a turn-key Exchange hosting solution that provides additional revenue without increasing support requirements.
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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 previous excerpt from “The Case for Hosted Exchange”.
Benefits for IT
WHAT BENEFITS CAN YOU EXPECT?
Why should your organization consider migrating to hosted Exchange? There are a number of important reasons to consider doing so that are focused on direct costs, opportunity costs, security and other benefits, as discussed below.
LOWER COSTS
Many decision makers believe that an internally managed Exchange deployment is less expensive to deploy and operate than hosted Exchange. While in some cases that perception is accurate, very often it is not. Osterman Research’s cost models have demonstrated that an on- premise, 100-seat Exchange deployment costs nearly $40 per seat per month over a three-year system lifetime, while a 1,000-seat deployment costs just over $24 per seat per months. Given that hosted Exchange offerings are priced substantially less than this? The direct cost savings from using hosted Exchange are substantial. It is also important to note that leading providers of hosted Exchange include the licensing costs as part of their service, further reducing the cost of hosted compared to on-premise Exchange.
MORE PREDICTABLE COSTS
Further, a hosted Exchange deployment provides more predictable costs than on-premise deployments because the cost per seat is fixed over the lifetime of the contract with the hosting provider. This predictability of costs manifests itself in two important ways:
- Unforeseen problems can create additional costs for an on-premise deployment, including natural disasters, power outages, moves to new facilities and other events that can add to the cost of managing on-premise Exchange in a somewhat unpredictable manner.
- An organization that continually adds users will at some point, reach the maximum number of users that its infrastructure will support and will then have to add servers and other infrastructure to support new users. This creates a step function in the total cost of ownership for an Exchange environment can delve up the cost of Exchange management dramatically.
REDUCED OPPORTUNITY COSTS
Among the more important issues that any organization should consider is that of the opportunity cost of IT staff members or, in smaller organizations, individuals who are charged with maintaining on-premise systems. Most decision makers understand that finding and retaining qualified IT staff is not particularly easy. As a result, in-house IT staff members should be used in a manner that allows them to provide maximum benefit to their employer, while also giving them a satisfying work experience that will motivate them not to go elsewhere. Using hosted Exchange frees IT staff members from the requirement to constantly monitor the servers to ensure continuous uptime, freeing them for work that is not only more interesting to them, but also more compelling for the business.
With hosted Exchange, IT staff can be deployed on projects that offer more competitive value to the organization and can also result in greater IT job satisfaction. For example, if an IT staff member can manage a massaging capability very well he or she provides some level of value to the organization. However, lf the same staff member spent ‘the same amount of time implementing new CRM capabilities that could convert a higher proportion of prospects into customers, it is very likely that much greater value could be realized from the same level of effort.
ACCESS TO EXCHANGE EXPERTISE
Although Exchange is an easy system for users to employ, it is not a simple system to manage internally. It requires expertise in a number of areas, particulars? When deploying a new version of the system, it requires expertise in each of the several server roles that comprise the Exchange platform, and it requires expertise in various other technologies that are integral to the Exchange ecosystem. The cost to develop this expertise can be high and, for smaller organizations, often prohibitive. In contrast, the use of a hosted Exchange provider can offer access to well-trained technical support staff that are available on a 24×7 basis that can typically resolve problems quickly and with minimum expertise from their customers.
The service aspect of hosted Exchange should not be overlooked when considering a provider of the service. Because few companies operate on an 8-to-5, Monday through Friday schedule, it is just as critical to have access to Exchange expertise at 11:00pm on a Saturday night as It is during normal business hours. This allows users to have their issues resolved in a timely manner without the cost and burden of maintaining in-house staff to manage a help desk, etc. In short, a specialist will virtually always offer better service and support when resolving Exchange- related problems.
ROBUST BUSINESS CONTINUITY AND DATA BACKUP
One of the more compelling benefits of hosted Exchange is the fact that a third party is managing the entire backend infrastructure, thereby minimizing the impact of major and minor services outages and the ensuing loss of email that can impede any business. For example, a hurricane or tornado can knock on-premise systems out for days or even weeks while less serious problems like power outages or storms can bring down massaging capabilities for hours or even a few days. While these events can also impact providers of hosted Exchange services, leading providers will back up their customers’ email, allowing uninterrupted receipt of email for customers until they can come back online. This is something that a non-technical staff member or senior executive can do.
Further, in the event that a customer’s facilities are made unavailable for any length of time, employees can still access their hosted Exchange accounts from anywhere using a Web browser a mobile device or a copy of Outlook or Entourage on their home computer.
RAPID DEPLOYMENT AND SCALING
One of the chief benefits of hosted Exchange is the speed with which email services can be deployed. For example, deploying hosted Exchange apically requires little more than the modification of an MX record and possibly a change in the configuration of local email clients. Adding new users to an existing hosted Exchange deployment normally requires just some simple modifications in a Web-based administration tool. This makes it easy to add or eliminate small numbers of users or even entire business operations, which is particularly important when integrating merged or acquired companies into an Exchange infrastructure.
DEPLOYMENT FLEXIBILITY
A hosted Exchange capability allows organizations to be more flexible in the way that they deploy email to their employees. For example, a company may opt to manage Exchange in- house for its corporate headquarters, but provide hosted Exchange to each of its field offices that do not have an in-house IT staff. This allows the organization to provide highly available messaging services that provide a consistent user experience across the entire organization, but at much lower cost than if the IT staff was used to manage the satellite offices.
RELATIVELY PAINLESS MIGRATION TO NEW EXCHANGE VERSIONS
Migrating from one version of Exchange to another is just that – a migration, not an upgrade. Because Exchange does not allow an in-place upgrade to a new version, the cost of migration can be very high and even prohibitive for smaller organizations. Using a hosted Exchange provider, on the other hand, minimizes or even eliminates the cost of migration, since some providers will migrate their customers to a new version at no charge, Not only does this minimize the IT pain and the time required to migrate, not to mention the potential for downtime in the system, but it also dramatically reduces the overall cost of Exchange management over the long term.
MINIMIZING THE IMPACT ON THE INTERNAL NETWORK
Another important benefit of hosted Exchange is that much of the network traffic that would normally take place with an on-premise deployment of Exchange is transferred to the hosting provider. For example, a hosted Exchange provider that also offers anti-virus and anti-spam filtering will eliminate 75% or more of the email that would normally come into the network as scam, only to be quarantined and eventually discarded by end users. This saves significantly on both bandwidth and storage, costs that are growing exponentially and unpredictably in smaller organizations.
ROBUST PHYSICAL SECURITY
Virtually all leading hosted Exchange providers operate very secure physical facilities that include video surveillance capabilities, multiple employee access points using multi-factor authentication, tracking and monitoring tools and other capabilities that protect their customers’ data from being compromised. In most cases the security provided by hosted Exchange providers exceeds the security that their customers could afford to deploy.
Measures, such as SAS 70 audits or WebTrust certification, can provide an extra level of assurance for customers. SAS 70 Type II, for example, is a set of professional auditing standards that assesses the internal controls that a provider uses, as well as the auditor’s opinion on the effectiveness of these controls.
THE ABILITY TO FOCUS ON CORE BUSINESS PROCESSES
The use of hosted Exchange allows an organization to focus more on its core business processes rather than devoting resources to managing its Exchange infrastructure. While many IT decision makers believe that managing massaging capabilities is part of their core competency that is really not the case in most organizations. Letting a hosted Exchange provider manage key messaging capabilities is most often a better use of IT staff members’ time, as discussed above.
THE ABILITY TO DEPLOY A HYBRID SOLUTION
Many organizations will want to maintain at least some part of their Exchange infrastructure In- house. The use of a hosted Exchange provider allows this sort of hybrid solution. For example a corporate headquarters with thousands of users could have Exchange deployed in-house, while remote offices that do not have dedicated IT staff or specialized Exchange expertise could use a hosted solution. This permits all users in the company to have the same experience with Outlook or Entourage and with their mobile devices, while at the same time driving down the cost and complexity of managing Exchange, Another variant of the hybrid approach can be to offer hosted Exchange for some users and a less feature-rich email offering for other users whose needs are not as sophisticated. For example, an organization could deploy hosted Exchange for office workers while deploying an email-only, non-Exchange solution for workers behind retail counter or on a factory floor.
You can download white paper “The Case for Hosted Exchange” from our site.
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 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”.
What is Hosted Exchange
Microsoft Exchange Server is the leading business-grade messaging system employed in North America and is currently used by 160 million people worldwide. Exchange offers a number of capabilities, including email, calendaring, task management, address lists, and access to shared document repositories, and other functions. Exchange was originally introduced in June 1996 and has been upgraded several times since to include additional and enhanced features. The current version is Exchange 2007, although Exchange 2010 was released in November 2009.
ENTER HOSTED EXCHANGE
Hosted Exchange has been offered for several years by a large and growing number of providers around the world. There are roughly 150 providers of hosted Exchange services worldwide, although these vendors vary widely in terms of their capabilities, the number of users they support, the ancillary services they provide, their pricing, etc. As of late 2009, there are roughly 10 million users of hosted Exchange worldwide, up from just 1.5 million seats in mid-2007.
WHO IS THE IDEAL CANDIDATE FOR HOSTED EXCHANGE
There is a perception that hosted Exchange is intended only for small businesses, while on-premise Exchange is better suited to mid-size and large organizations. While this has been the conventional wisdom for some time, and while smaller organizations can realize the most significant per-seat savings from the use of hosted Exchange, larger organizations are realizing the benefits of migrating to a hosted Exchange model. For example, GlaxoSmithKline announced in March 2009 that it is migrating 100,000 users to hosted Exchange.
You can download white paper “The Case for Hosted Exchange” from our site.
Click here to read the next excerpt from “The Case for Hosted Exchange”.
Intermedia: The Case For Hosted Exchange
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.
Overview
Email is absolutely critical to those who use it. For example:
- An Osterman Research survey conducted in September 2009 found that 81% of email users regularly check their work-related email from home on weekdays, 78% do on weekends and 60% do so on vacation. The survey also found that despite the growth of alternative communication tools, 45% report that over the past six to twelve months their use of email is increasing.
- A May 2009 Osterman Research survey found that 97% of email users consider it to be important in doing their work. By contrast, only 86% of users felt this strongly about the telephone, while 45% felt this strongly about instant messaging capabilities.
- Osterman Research estimates that the worldwide installed base for Microsoft Exchange is 160 million users, making it the leading business-grade messaging system in use in terms of total number of seats.
Clearly, email is absolutely critical to users and the organizations that deploy it, and it is becoming more so over time.
The Bottom Line
Because email and messaging capabilities are so critical, they have in some respects become like a utility: like electricity, for example, email is so critical to the operation of any organization that it no longer provides any substantive competitive differentiation between companies. Like other utilities, then, the goal is to a) ensure that service remains available as close to 100% of the time as possible while b) simultaneously being provided as inexpensively as possible. For many organizations, managing email internally is a thing of the past, just like producing one’s own electricity is a concept of the past.
A growing number of organizations are finding that the way to accomplish this is through the use of Microsoft Exchange as a hosted service, a model in which a remote third party provider manages all backed services for a flat monthly per user fee. The advantages of this approach for organizations that want to realize the benefits of Exchange are that uptime of the Exchange infrastructure can be very high and the cost of managing Exchange can be reduced significantly – typically more than 50% compared to on-premise management, as shown in the following table. Further, the use of a hosted Exchange service allows an in-house IT staff to be deployed to other projects that will provide more value to the organization as a whole.
Monthly, Three-Year Cost of Ownership per Seat for Hosted and On-Premise Microsoft Exchange
| DELIVERY MODELS | 10 USERS | 100 USERS | 1,000 USERS |
| On-premise | $389.65 | $39.85 | $24.13 |
| Hosted | $32.46 | $14.45 | $10.85 |
| $ SAVINGS FROM USED HOSTED EXCHANGE | $357.19 | $25.40 | $13.28 |
| % SAVINGS FROM USING HOSTED EXCAHNGE | 92% | 64% | 55% |
You can download white paper “The Case for Hosted Exchange” from our site.
Click here to read the next excerpt from “The Case for Hosted Exchange”.
Intermedia Sponsoring 2 New Spiceworks Communities
Home to over 900,000 IT Pros in small-to-medium businesses, Spiceworks now has two new communities.
Intermedia is now sponsoring MS Exchange and Unified Communications. Check out the links and drop by the community for more info.
More from the Partner Summit: MSP Mentor
From MSP Mentor live from the Partner Summit: Intermedia to Integrate Hosted Exchange with MSP Software
The convergence of SaaS with managed services is on display at the Intermedia Partner Summit in Silicon Valley. A few minutes ago, MSPs started asking Intermedia if the company would integrate with hosted Exchange platform with MSP-oriented tools. Intermedia said yes. In fact, some of the work is already complete. And more integrations are coming….
Update from MSP Mentor
New article from MSP Mentor coming out of Intermedia’s Partner Summit:
Answers to 5 Key Hosted Exchange Questions
Earlier today, I raised five key questions about the hosted Exchange and hosted Unified Communications markets. Now, I’ve gathered a few answers to those questions at the Intermedia Partner Summit in Silicon Valley. Here are some clues about how VARs and MSPs are transitioning their hosted Exchange strategies…
From Ferris Research Today
News from Ferris Research Today: Intermedia Hosted Exchange Adds Telephony
Hosted Exchange vendor Intermedia has added integrated telephony to its offering. The focus is on sales to SMBs, up to around 1,000 seats.
Thoughts:
- Hitherto the offering has consisted of email, IM, fax, and SharePoint.
- This is the first time we’ve heard of a hosted email offering providing integrated telephony.
- Telephony doesn’t require high bandwidth. However, it does require short latency. Packets need to get through reasonably quickly. Think of Skype’s periodic problems. Latency isn’t a problem if the packets go over an in-house network. But when they go over the public Internet, as they will with SMBs, quality of service becomes an issue. Time is on Intermedia’s side, and by 2020 latency shouldn’t be a problem for voice throughout the world.
- Intermedia is one of the few hosted Exchange vendors to be making money. The company is privately held and doesn’t disclose revenues, but we estimate its hosted Exchange revenues at around $40M annually.
Intermedia Reports 20% Revenue Growth in 2009
We recently reported a 20 percent increase in year-over-year revenue and a 15 percent increase in the size of our customer base. We attribute this growth to our continued focus on the customer experience, including development of our new DataEcho™ architecture that guarantees the safety and availability of customers’ Microsoft Exchange data.
In 2009, we were the first to market with hosted Exchange 2010, launching the service moments after Microsoft announced the availability of its Exchange Server 2010 software. Eighty-two percent of Intermedia’s new customers are choosing hosted Exchange 2010 over hosted Exchange 2007, which we continue to offer. We also made substantial investments in the service, support and proprietary technology we deliver around hosted Exchange and other communications services, a key source of our differentiation versus niche hosting players and online service providers. Milestones included:
- Reaching 225,000 premium hosted Exchange seats: Intermedia is the world’s largest hosted Exchange provider.
- The first SaaS industry 100 percent data protection guarantee: Intermedia guarantees that customers’ email and other business-critical data stored in Exchange are fully protected in any eventuality. Intermedia is able to credibly offer this guarantee, which is enforced by stiff financial penalties, because of the proprietary DataEcho architecture the company developed to work with hosted Exchange 2010.
- Addition of fourth US datacenter: Intermedia opened a new East coast datacenter featuring multiple Tier-1 Internet provider connections and hardware from Cisco, Dell and EMC – investments that assure high reliability and the fastest round trip for email. Exchange 2010 customers are able to choose among Intermedia’s East and West coast datacenters for the location of their mailboxes, further accelerating round trip times for email.
- New features for greater customer control over the Exchange environment: Intermedia added new features to its proprietary HostPilot® Control Panel that further enable Exchange administration to be delegated to non-technical staff. These features included remote device management, which enables customers to remotely wipe data from a lost BlackBerry in just a few clicks. Intermedia also developed UserPilot – a product that enables clients to unify log-in capabilities across their hosted Exchange and on-premise Microsoft applications.
- Continued excellence in reliability and customer support: Average 2009 speed-to-answer for 24×7 phone-based customer support was under 60 seconds. Intermedia continued to offer a service level guarantee for 99.999 percent availability, which is less than six minutes of downtown a year.
- Expanding reseller network to over 4,000 private label partners: The number of partners and affiliates reselling Intermedia to their own customers substantially increased. Intermedia also extended its partner program to Latin America and inked a North American distribution deal with Fortune 100-ranked Ingram Micro.
“Small and mid-size businesses demand enterprise communications capabilities that are incredibly simple to set-up and reliable to use,” says Serguei Sofinski, chief executive officer, Intermedia. “To deliver that kind of experience, we invest heavily in our premium infrastructure, support, HostPilot Control Panel and Exchange Concierge™ migration service. We will continue to make these investments in 2010.”
Intermedia Launches UK’s First Business-Class Hosted Exchange 2010 Service
We recently extended our hosted Exchange 2010 service to the UK market. Our industry-leading new offering is the first to deliver Exchange 2010 with clustering and redundant server infrastructure – technologies critical to the high reliability businesses expect for email service.
According to Michael Osterman of IT analyst firm Osterman Research, “Businesses are increasingly using hosted Exchange for their email given the lower cost of ownership that it can provide – not to mention the very high availability that comes from the use of clustering and redundant servers in a carrier-grade environment. Exchange 2010 offers a number of important benefits, particularly to remote and mobile workers, not least of which is a much-improved Outlook Web App experience. As one of the leading providers of hosted Exchange, Intermedia is well positioned to help organizations drive down their cost of providing email, as well as provide a variety of additional, value-added services.”
Our announcement comes on the heels of a strong 2009 performance for our London-based UK operations. We tripled our UK customer base last year with a product line that includes hosted Microsoft Exchange, Office Communications Server 2007, SharePoint 3.0 and support for BlackBerry, iPhone, Droid and other smartphones.
We have also secured space for an additional datacenter located in the UK. Like our four US datacenters, the UK datacenter will feature redundant Tier-1 Internet connections and hardware from Cisco, Dell and EMC – investments that assure high reliability and the fastest round trip for email. The UK datacenter will also provide in-country email service and storage for UK companies that prefer this option.
“Small- and mid-size businesses in the UK require hosted services that give them the same capabilities as much larger competitors,” says Serguei Sofinski, chief executive officer, Intermedia. “We deliver enterprise-class service in a way that’s incredibly simple for our customers to use and manage. That’s why we’ve been successful in the UK market and expect additional growth with hosted Exchange 2010.”
Intermedia Introduces Hosted Exchange 2010 and 2007 Support for Google’s Nexus One Smartphone
We announced last week that our hosted Exchange services (including Exchange 2010 and Exchange 2007) are available on Google’s newly launched Nexus One smartphone. Using Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync, Intermedia is able to configure the new Google Nexus One – as well as the Motorola Droid, Palm Treo, Motorola Q, T-Mobile Dash, Samsung Blackjack and the iPhone – so users can take advantage of the same enterprise-grade Exchange services they are used to in the office. Those capabilities include email, calendars, tasks and instant messaging.
A key feature available in Nexus One, according to Google, is the ability to have not one, but multiple Exchange accounts fully configured with ActiveSync – including syncing of contacts, email and other information to and from the phone and the Exchange accounts.
Intermedia also fully supports BlackBerry® Wireless Solution hosting for hosted Exchange. The company provides users with BlackBerry® Enterprise Solutions (BES) connectivity – for true wireless “push” email. Customers get two-way wireless synchronization of email, calendar, contacts and tasks.