The VAR Guy is listening for clues about the hosted Exchange industry. Are VARs embracing hosted Exchange opportunities and how are those efforts going so far? Bob Leibholz, VP of sales and business development at Intermedia, provided some key reality checks during the Intermedia Partner Summit this morning in Silicon Valley. Here are some details.
During his kick-off presentation, Leibholz offered the following anecdotes:
- Intermedia has attracted 4,721 private label hosted Exchange partners. Those partners — VARs, managed services providers, etc. — now offer hosted Exchange under their own brands.
- The number of partner mailboxes grew 52.4% over the past 12 months (February 2009 to February 2010).
- Intermedia’s launch of hosted Exchange 2010 in Q4 2009 was a “first to mark” move for hosting providers. The launch generated an “immediate tripling” of monthly partner mailbox growth. “There’s no other place to purchase [hosted Exchange 2010],” said Leibholz. “And competitors won’t offer it until June or July 2010.”
- Relationships with Dell, Ingram Micro Seismic, BlackBerry, LiveOffice, Level Platforms have allowed Intermedia to grow its channel base.
Still, hosted Exchange is only one piece of Intermedia’s channel partner strategy. As Microsoft and Google introduce aggressive SaaS email prices, Intermedia has pushed deeper into the hosted unified communications market, through a relationship with Unison Technologies. The VAR Guy will be back later today with more thoughts on that effort.
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Intermedia is our preferred partner for Hosted Exchange, and they have been great to work with. We’re working a number of customers out to discuss this, and it’s been a rather loud topic of discussion this quarter.
Dave: Please keep The VAR Guy posted as you mull potential hosted unified communications strategies. Here at the conference, Intermedia is carefully balancing hosted Exchange strategies (growing market, thin margins) with emerging hosted unified communications strategies (larger margins, market education needed). The VAR Guy plans to watch the balancing act closely.
-TVG