Customer Fixes Headaches with Email and FAX

On premise installations of Microsoft Exchange or other enterprise class email platforms no longer make sense for most companies with less than 1,000 mailboxes. Beyond the costs for hardware, licenses and IT administration time, companies are increasingly accounting for employee productivity loss due to downtime, SPAM and lack of mobile access to email.

This week I spoke to Lee Karjala, General Manager of STKUSA. STKGM.COM is a leading wholesaler of dry goods to dollar stores. They have been in business for 20 years. They primarily sell to independent stores, convenience stores and drug stores.

In the last year they have moved several of their back-office and internal systems to outsourced Web-based providers. Previously they had an IT staff of two with a cost of over $100k per year to maintain basic services such as their on-premise Microsoft Exchange corporate email. Previously they had daily issues with an excessive amount of SPAM, viruses and downtime. Previously they had standalone fax machines.

By switching to Intermedia's Hosted Exchange service, they instantly had relief for their SPAM and virus problems. They also no longer had to experience regular outages that the IT staff would spend hours struggling with. Employees are also regular users of Outlook Web Access for full email capability off site.

STKUSA also subscribes to Intermedia's Fax via Email service. Now, all employees can have their own fax number and all of their faxes are sent directly to their email. Faxes are now never lost, backed up and are accessible from anywhere.

When I proposed a future where email, fax, voicemail and more could be tied to a CRM platform, Lee agreed that this would be the perfect integration.

As hosting providers we know that these services are becoming more accessible to small and medium sized business – but as of yet are not as integrated as they are at large enterprises. Hosting providers that help make this vision come to life will see great revenue growth and will successfully transition from a hosting provider to an IT solutions provider.