Introduction - SaaS and Messaging

I'd like to thank TheWHIR for inviting me to be an industry blogger for Software as a Service (SaaS) and Messaging (e-mail, spam, antivirus, etc.)

For my first post, I'll give you a quick background on myself so that you know where I'm coming from. I've been in the hosting business since 1997, when I started an e-commerce and hosting business which was renamed as BizLand.com in 1999. This later evolved into The Endurance International Group, which is today a large web hosting company with multiple brands. In 2002, I started groupSPARK, the leader in Private Label hosted applications such as Microsoft Exchange Server, Microsoft Dynamics CRM, and Microsoft SharePoint. groupSPARK's core focus is Exchange Hosting, which gives small and medium sized businesses the benefits of Microsoft Exchange Server at a small business price and without the headaches.

In essence, we arm ISP's and Web Hosting companies to sell our hosted SaaS apps - all under their own name, brand, and URL's - within minutes. By selling applications to their customers, hosting companies are able to increase revenue (ARPU) by selling to existing customers and decrease customer churn as changing providers for hosted applications is quite difficult.

Based on my experiences and interests, I'll be writing in this blog about SaaS as well as Messaging - helping ISP's and Hosting providers stay on top of the latest news and trends.

In my next post, I'll talk about SPAM 2.0 - the spike in SPAM that we've all been seeing for the last two months.