(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — Open-source groupware provider Open-Xchange (www.open-xchange.com) has announced the first Open-Xchange Partner Summit will take place October 8 at the RheinEnergie Stadion in Cologne, Germany, providing its partner community with a new forum to learn how to advance their business with email and collaboration services.
According to its Thursday announcement, the conference’s theme will be “Competence Meets Demand,” giving SaaS providers, system integrators, resellers and independent software vendors the resources to make the most of Open-Xchange’s open-source collaboration services, which can be deployed as either an on-premise solution or Software-as-a-Service using the exact same source code.
“With its partners, Open-Xchange brings together the benefits of on-premise and SaaS, which results in a growing number of customers for both system integrators and service providers,” Open-Xchange chief executive officer Rafael Laguna said in a statement. “SaaS is a disruptive way for a growing number of enterprises to benefit from groupware technology without an initial investment or on-going administration efforts at unrivalled price points. At the same time, we’ve seen large enterprises realize lower cost by moving their on-premise installation from their proprietary client-server solution to a modular open-source stack using a full-featured web client.”
The summit will feature separate tracks for system integrators, SaaS providers and ISVs, providing in-depth technology and marketing strategy sessions for business and technical professionals interested in growing their businesses using Open-Xchange. It will concludes with an evening networking event.
Highlights of the Summit include a keynote by Laguna in which he will share ideas about how channel partners can benefit in this challenging economy from industry trends such as SaaS, mobility and open-source. Executive sales and marketing vice president Frank Hoberg will explain how system integrators, hosting providers and ISVs can take advantage of Open-Xchange’s on-premise and SaaS offerings in different market segments. There will also be presentations by executives from Parallels, Univention and SEP, providing perspectives on integration, security and mobility technologies.
