Is the UK channel missing out on a lucrative email cloud opportunity? Well according to study commissioned by Intermedia, it would seem they may be.
Small providers of hosted Microsoft Exchange are missing out on a lucrative opportunity to increase margins, according to a study conducted from Intermedia by Osterman Research.With these companies facing lower profit margins resulting from higher infrastructure investment and IT labour, Osterman outlines the case for partnering with a larger, more established hosted email provider.
In its `Improving the Economics for Existing Providers of Hosted Microsoft Exchange’study, Osterman highlights the opportunity for smaller hosting providers to achieve greater margins, competitiveness and cultivate stronger customer relationships.
“This study shows the considerable benefits that can be realised from working with cloud services vendors. It helps smaller players to focus on managing and cultivating their customer relationships, rather than investing into and managing on-premises infrastructure needed to offer a complex service such as Hosted Microsoft Exchange.” said Aidan Simister, UK sales director at Intermedia.
The research shows strong evidence that the third-party hosted Exchange market will continue to grow due to the diversity of vendors’ offerings that third-party hosted Exchange providers can deliver alongside it. And because email is the dominant business communications application for most users (the typical user spends a mean of 167 minutes per day doing work in their email), owning the mailbox is the main route providers can use to upsell other services.
Furthermore, the variety of professional services that hosted Exchange providers can offer to their customers, such as integration with legacy systems, is invaluable.
Microsoft Exchange Server, originally released in April 1993, is in its eighth major release and has an installed base of up to 470 million seats worldwide. Osterman Research found in a recent survey of 163 primarily mid-sized and large organisations (minimum of 50 email users) that Exchange leads both the on-premises and cloud markets for business-grade email systems.
