All hosting companies have customers from many disparate industries. Those of us that do not interact with customers all day long always benefit when we review the types of businesses that we serve. I promise you that not all of your customers fit into the categories you think about often - ie., Real Estate, law firms and manufacturers. Today I spoke to the Operations Manager of the Pink Elephant Group. He uses Intermedia.NET to host his corporate email and Blackberry accounts.
The Pink Elephant Group has nightclubs and events in several cities around the world including New York, Las Vegas, Miami, Chicago and St. Barts. They depend on Microsoft Exchange to communicate with employees and locations around the world. They use the Public Folder feature to share calendars and keep track of each night club and the schedules and events they are booking. Most of their mailboxes are accessed via Blackberries or Outlook Web Access by management, event promoters and more.
Those of us that are not night owls who party with the A-List crowd can only imagine what the high-paced and exclusive world of big-city night clubs is like. The Operations manager finds the security of Microsoft Exchange, the ability to have public and private contacts (one employee has over 4,000 contacts) and the always up-to-date push email and calendars to be the key features his business depends on. Formerly, they had an Exchange Server 5.5 on-site installation that was simply taking up too much time for the business to maintain, let alone upgrade. The hosted Exchange model allows them to grow their business, the number of locations and employees without worrying about licensing, software updates and the reliability issues associated with running their own server.
Another key reason hosted Exchange fits their business is that they need to keep their corporate domain separate from their marketing domains and email newsletter activities. They have a large number of active email newsletter and club event announcement emails that they send out through another service at a separate domain. They could not afford to have their corporate email blocked because of SPAM or DOS-like issues.
Finding a customer outside of the industries we've tailored our products and marketing to is always eye-opening. These customers raise businesses issues that we may have never thought about, but our services address all the same.
