The company says this collaboration will deliver a "cost-effective, enterprise-class alternative" to commercial email and collaboration products while keeping it at competitive prices and will be offered to end-users via web hosting and service providers.

The integration is part of the ongoing development of Parallels "Open Platform" initiative, which uses APIs to facilitate the integration of its virtualization and automation technology with any sort of third party application or system.

"Our work with Open-Xchange advances Parallels' Open Platform initiative to provide customers with a common platform to manage and automate service delivery," says Serguei Beloussov, CEO of Parallels. "The integrated solutions enable service providers to expand their product offerings and include enterprise-proven collaboration technology for the Linux platform, and deliver them to end-users via a profitable, easily accessible SaaS model."

Working closely with Open-Xchange, Parallels says it is creating connectors for Open-Xchange Hosting Edition into Parallels Plesk Control Panel and Parallels Business Automation, enabling hosting service providers to deploy and run Open-Xchange seamlessly in combination with Parallels' automation tools through a software as a service model.

Parallels says with Open-Xchange Smart Collaboration, service providers will get the flexibility to bundle and charge separately for individual resources, such as disk space, mailbox storage limits or shared folders.

"There is significant and growing enterprise demand for hosted messaging and collaboration," says Dan Golding, VP and research director at Tier 1 Research, quoted in the announcement. "At a time when some of the conventional hosted messaging choices are less appealing to hosting providers, adding new alternatives to the mix is a significant positive to the hosting industry and to enterprise customers."

Last week, Parallels reported it would begin reselling myLittleAdmin, a web-based administration tool for Microsoft SQL Server 2005.