HostingCon 2008 - MailSite and Your In-House Exchange Alternative

• By Liam Eagle on August 07, 2008

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Allow me to cut and paste my preamble from Tuesday's MailChannels post:

HostingCon was last week, I'm aware. But by the end of the show I had talked to more people, and absorbed more information, than I was able to blog about. So I'll be filling in a few holes this week before all is said and done.

Wednesday (at HostingCon) was a busy day. I talked to a lot of people on Wednesday, which is why I'm playing catch-up this week. Everyone had some very interesting stuff to say, and nobody warranted leaving out, which is why I'm still playing catch-up more than a week later.

The good news: if you can bear with me for another couple of posts, I'll be wrapping up my own HostingCon coverage either today or tomorrow, and moving on to blogging about other things.

The other good news: all these HostingCon follow-up posts are about interesting conversations I had with interesting people doing interesting work. Hopefully you'll find them, you know, interesting.

One of those people I spoke to Wednesday was John Davies of MailSite, who was promoting both his company's MailSite Fusion messaging and collaboration platform, and its AstraSync plug-in software for Blackberry phones.

MailSite Fusion is an email and collaboration platform for Windows, intended to be a more affordable alternative to hosted Exchange. The list of features is long, and rather than repeat them all here, I'll direct you to the MailSite website for the exhaustive pitch.

The especially interesting part of the discussion was a model Davies described for deploying and offering a MailSite-based hosted email offering.

There are plenty of small businesses these days that are convinced of the value of hosted email, particularly hosted Exchange. And while they may be ready to come on board looking for the brand name at first, many of those small businesses can't afford a hosted Exchange solution.

MailSite, on the other hand, is designed to be private labeled. So a hosting provider can set up a lower-cost house-brand hosted messaging and collaboration solution they can offer to customers who decide the Exchange solution is to expensive an alternative for about 50 percent of the cost. He says the host's margin is about the same as Exchange when charging the customer half as much.

The example he gives for this particular two-pronged approach is the ever-used-as-an-example Rackspace, which offers a hosted Exchange solution alongside a house-brand mail service (in Rackspace's case, the house brand is Mailtrust, which is the re-branded Webmail.us, acquired last year by Rackspace).

It's a cool idea. Offer the hosted Exchange service for the customers who are committed to the brand, and supplement that with the house-brand alternative for the customers who don't want to spend the extra money.

AstraSync is something else altogether. It's a plugin application for Blackberry phones that enables them to accept the Exchange ActiveSync protocol, creating a direct connection that eliminates the need for the email host to operate a Blackberry Enterprise Server.

The application is a separate product form MailSite fusion, but is a cool little app nonetheless. It hasn't launched just yet, but should be available in the next few weeks for about $50 per mailbox per year. You can sign up to receive more information about it at the AstraSync website.

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