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By Liam Eagle, theWHIR.com
September 2, 2008 -- (WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) -- Rackspace (rackspace.com) division and email hosting provider Mailtrust (mailtrust.com) said this week that it has made hosted Exchange 2007 available to its network of more than 450 resellers.
The new offering is an upgrade over the previously available offerings of managed Exchange 2003 and the company's proprietary Noteworthy platform. According to the announcement, the major advantages to the 07 upgrade include larger mailbox storage limits, larger public folders and web access tools with an AJAX enabled interface.
Mailtrust's announcement credits the availability of hosted Exchange 2007 to the company's redesigned control panel, which counts among its most, ahem, noteworthy features the ability to add and remove both Exchange and Noteworthy mailboxes in the same interface and domain.
In an interview with the WHIR last week, Mailtrust executives Patrick Matthews and Kirk Averett stressed the ongoing significance of the company's reseller business, in spite of its expanded role as a division of Rackspace, following the late-2007 acquisition by the hosting provider.
Numbers-wise, the significance of the reseller business to Mailtrust is well illustrated in the press release via a quote from the company's manager of reseller sales, Adam Williams.
"Theses resellers are a vital aspect of our business model, accounting for more than 545,000 Noteworthy mailboxes on 113,000 domains," says Williams, in the announcement.
The hybrid model - and the ability to sell both Exchange and the less expensive Noteworthy to a single customer on a per-user basis - is an offering unique to Mailtrust and a source of considerable savings to custmers (a philosophical point discussed at greater length in the Matthews/Averett interview).
Mailtrust president Matthews says reseller-oriented thinking is not unique to Mailtrust under the Rackspace umbrella, despite that company's overt concern with customer support, and mostly-direct customer relationships.
"It's not just the Mailtrust division that's engaged at this higher level of reseller program," says Matthews, of Rackspace. "I think there's an understanding that there's a whole network of channels of getting products in front of people and that good resellers are just incredibly valuable. Your top resellers grow aggressively, and are adding a lot of value to a customer at the far end of the chain."
Averett offers Rackspace's Mosso (mosso.com) utility computing division as an example of a part of the company with some more developed reseller relationships, for example, among developers of applications who have a desire to offer hosting space as part of their products, but no desire to operate the back-end systems that support that space.
According to Matthews, not only is the company's reseller channel a big part of its business today, but it's an important avenue for future growth at Mailtrust.
"I just think there's a tremendous future value around this," he says. "And we actually see a lot of future growth potential inside the reseller market."
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.
About This Issue | Read Digital Edition
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.
About This Issue | Read Digital Edition
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.
About This Issue | Read Digital Edition
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