While filling fairly supplemental roles, the two are rarely either at odds or in cahoots, instead living in a sort of peaceful coexistence. But as hosted applications become a more relevant consideration for most aspects of small-business IT, circumstances are forcing hosts and smaller integrators to consider the areas in which they overlap.

Dedicated hosting firm The Planet (theplanet.com) sought to address that overlap from the collaborative angle this week, with the announcement that it plans to introduce a hosted Microsoft Small Business Server product in September.

The product is a dedicated box equipped with Microsoft Exchange Server, Microsoft Outlook, Microsoft Office SharePoint Server and Microsoft SQL Server, bundled with anti-virus and spam protection, as well as a data backup solution.

Significantly, the product is designed for distribution through partnerships with the small business specialists a product like this might otherwise seek to circumvent. The reason for that, says Urvish Vashi, director of product management at the company, is the potential for customization represented by the integrator channel, to say nothing of the pre-existing relationships these companies have with the intended end-user.

"These small business customers were struggling with a sort of blunt approach that a lot of ISVs might be taking to this market," says Vashi, "which was that because they're small, and because they don't have a big budget, they're kind of like one size fits all, and they have cookie-cutter needs. I think that's where we found the fallacy in the approach."

The solution, The Planet, lay in the community of small business specialists that already had a vested interest in the unique needs of their specific customers.

"There's a sort of cottage industry that has formed around servicing the IT needs of these small businesses," he says, "and that is the small business integrators. Those are these sometimes two or three, sometimes multi hundred-person organizations, IT consultants, that are the trusted advisors of these small businesses. And they were the ones that were ultimately on the hook for making strategic and tactical day-to-day decisions for their customers. We realized they were an integral part of not just our go-to-market strategy - how do we find these customers - but an integral part of how we service them. So we had to build a solution that was equally attractive to the end user as it was to the small business specialist."

While the advantage of a ready-made distribution channel to The Planet is obvious, the advantage for integrators of having access to a hosted package should be just as apparent, says Vashi.

"Some of these guys are already sort of providing it as a service, "I'll run and manage it for you," but it's on the client site," he says, "which means all the things you'd expect: a hardware failure at three in the morning means someone gets in a car. It means that your direct sale market is roughly how far you can drive at three in the morning. This is our model, and it feels no different. But it feels really different when you go and speak to these small business specialists."

For integrators, the hosted service model turns their customer relationships into sources of recurring revenue. And that process, though it may take some time to figure out, promises to extend the boundaries of those integrators, says Vashi.

The Planet says it has built the partner program for the hosted SMS service using its rather extensive experience with reseller Web hosting. It provides a suggested price for the server - setup and monthly fee - and gives the reseller a discount on that price that increases as the partner advances to greater levels of business.

And rather than operate a direct sales channel for the product, The Planet intends to direct sales leads that come its way to its partners.

"The good news is that this is a really natural extension of what we're already doing," says Vashi. "And we're also used to servicing resellers. So picking a new technology and going incrementally into the capabilities to service that platform and a different set of resellers, I think it makes sense."

The Planet says it collaborated with Frost & Sullivan's Stratecast Partners in the creation of a white paper on the solution, called "The Planet's Hosted Microsoft SBS Service:  An Attractive IT Outsourcing Solution for Small Businesses."