Blogs: M&M’s --- Part I - This stands for Marketing and Money
Blogs: Sometimes not making money is ok....
News: SaaS Software Licensing with Insight
News: Managed Email Security Services Trends with eleven and Variomedia
(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) -- Open-source collaboration software provider Open-Xchange (www.open-xchange.com) has now made its webmail, calendaring and contact infrastructure available for free to qualifying partners, with the stipulation that they have to offer its advanced services.
According to Open-Xchange's Friday announcement, qualifying partners with large numbers of existing email users such as web hosting providers, telcos, ISPs, as well as academic institutions and non-profit organizations can take advantage its fully-maintained webmail module, which includes installation and configuration support of the Open-Xchange software.
"Offering rich email as an alternative to Exchange is a must-have for hosters from a competitive perspective, plus it creates revenue streams and positions hosters to sell complementary services that solidify their relationship with customers," Tier 1 Research (www.t1r.com) research analyst Philbert Shih said in a statement. "The collaboration and groupware capabilities that Open-Xchange brings to proprietary email platforms is one way for hosters to introduce mid-market, rich email platforms -- a growing opportunity driven by the growth in web-enabled mobile devices and an increasingly mobile workforce."
Open-Xchange hopes giving away its business-class webmail, it will open itself up to up-selling opportunities. The special offer requires partners to offer customers higher-value Open-Xchange features such as support for mobile devices.
"With our easily scalable open source infrastructure, we are able to offer partners a unique solution for these economically challenging times," Open-Xchange chief executive officer Rafael Laguna. "By adding Open-Xchange, service providers, educational institutions, government and other non-profits get a secure, scalable, cost-effective webmail client for all their users for free -- and can offer an upgrade to mobile device support and fully-featured groupware."
Open-Xchange is an open-source affordable alternative to commercial email and collaboration platforms like Microsoft Exchange and SharePoint, providing features like newly expanded mobility support, document sharing, shared calendars and shared address books.
Open-Xchange has been benefiting from recent partnerships with web hosts including one with 1&1 Internet (www.1and1.co.uk) that brought Open-Xchange to 1&1's UK customers in September 2009 in the form of 1&1 MailXchange.
Read Back Issues of WHIR Magazine
October 2009 - Web Hosting's All Star Team
This has been, for us, one of the most interesting, exciting and challenging build-ups to an issue of the magazine yet, Web Hosting's All Star Team. The balloting process was our first experiment with a kind of user participation we're planning to do a lot more with in the months to come. We had thousands of ballots submitted, with hundreds of write-in suggestions and a demonstration of user engagement that has us feeling super positive about the project.
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July 2009 - What am I Worth?
One of the interesting luxuries of working on a project like the printed WHIR magazine is that it allows us to play with things like our point of view from one issue to the next. In recent months we've been giving added attention to the kind of practical and applicable advice aimed at smaller hosts and resellers. This issue carries on with that point of view, asking, in our cover story, "what am I worth?" It's a complicated question without a clear-cut answer.
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May 2009 - The Blueprint for a Small Web Host
I was a little surprised by how difficult it became to see this idea through. We set out to assemble a blueprint for a small hosting business, but butted up pretty quickly against the general impossibility of covering all the territory that was out there to be covered. The basic constraints of a printed magazine, and the less-than-infinite amount of time we had available forced us to face the fact that we could never produce an exhaustive guide to starting a hosting company.
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