An article on ZDNet posted this morning discloses some more information about Microsoft’s possible future plans for hosted business-class services. It seems that Ballmer mentioned that Hosted Exchange, Hosted SharePoint, and Hosted OfficeCommunication Server are on the road-map, but that there is no clear timeline and that they would be testing with three to four customers.
From a hosting company’s perspective, what does this mean? At the moment, not much, only that we might see some more competition and that there is still some uncertainty of what direction Microsoft will take; however, the fact that Microsoft will be focusing on large account customers seems to indicate that the customer-base that most hosts focus on is different than where Microsoft’s focus would be. We focus on SMB, while MS focuses on the large, fortune 500 customers.
The best way to compete with Microsoft on this front is to offer differentiating features. For Hosted Exchange, this might be Good and BlackBerry services, a lower cost achiving service, a better anti-virus/anti-spam service; For SharePoint, this could be partnering with SharePoint ISVs to create add-on templates or services to the base Microsoft SharePoint stack. This also might be a good time for hosts to examine alternatives to Exchange, such as Zimbra which, according to TechCrunch, has around 6 million paid mailbox subscribers.
One thing that I can’t help but remember is the amount of fear hosting companies have had with having Microsoft walk through their door. The announcement from Ballmer will most likely make the job of the Hosting Evangelists, those people responsible for convincing mostly Linux pure play hosts to launch Microsoft products, much harder.
And finally, what does the announcement of Google launching Google Apps Premier mean for Microsoft and the rest of the hosting community?
