The first part of Henry’s presentation was about the history of email and the original platforms, technologies and providers.
Hosted email solutions have been part of hosting packages since the early days of shared hosting back in the mid 1990’s. In his presentation Henry Weber, VP of Operations, FuseMail, LLC reviewed the different options that hosting companies have when looking to offer email solutions to clients.
With the average shared hosting customer having 3 to 7 mailboxes per domain, email can be an expensive feature to simply “give away”. Reselling mailboxes on a per employee basis can generate more revenue and be more profitable than simply selling a shared hosting account or dedicated servers. More importantly yesterday’s POP/IMAP solutions and terrible Linux based Webmail interfaces have functionality gaps and a user experience that is perceived by users and companies as being extremely antiquated. The days of Horde and SquirrelMail are over.
Henry’s presentation gave a great overview of the alternatives – both in-house hosted by the hosting provider and outsourced and resalable platforms. Henry shared screenshots, feature overviews and retail price points for different offerings such as SmarterTools, MailSite, BlueTie, Fusemail and Intermedia.
Henry shared his belief that Webmail is the future of email. The days of thick clients like Outlook and Thunderbird are coming to an end. One interface, accessible from everywhere is the method that Google went to market with Gmail and is now a widely accepted method for accessing email.
“APIs” are the future of email according to Henry. With customization of Webmail interfaces companies and users will get more value out of their Webmail experience than ever before. With drag and drop email & business process automation for specific folders, there are many new features that are possible once APIs are integrated with the Webmail experience.
Henry referenced some great features that BlueTie have integrated and call “Featuretisements”. They have a partnership with Orbitz where flights and trips that are created on Orbitz are created in a mashup between BlueTie and Orbitz. Resellers and BlueTie can share some referral revenue from integrations like this.
In summary, the Email Hosting Trends: Past, Present, and Future, presentation by Henry Weber, VP of Operations, at Fusemail, LLC., was a good overview of powerful email platforms both Linux based and Windows based.
About William Toll
William Toll, VP, Marketing at Yottaa, Inc., has held Marketing and Product Management positions in the Web hosting and Internet infrastructure industry since the late 1990s. Currently William is driving the marketing strategy and implementation for Yottaa, Inc. Yottaa, The Web Performance Company, provides innovative cloud services enabling its customers to assess, benchmark, monitor and optimize their websites and Web applications for a better user experience and improved ROI. Most recently William was at the leading managed hosting and cloud services provider, NaviSite. At NaviSite, William was responsible for developing and marketing the company's hosted product lines, including managed cloud services, managed hosting, managed business applications and shared and dedicated hosting for SMBs. In past positions at companies such as Affinity Internet, Inc., Intermedia.NET, and NTT/VERIO, William was the driving force in launching and enhancing successful SMB focused services including: Shared Hosting services, Microsoft Exchange and hosting add-on services like Online Marketing and Web Design. William received a BA in Marketing from New England College. William Toll can be found on Twitter: @utollwi
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