(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — Business-class, open-source collaboration software provider Open-Xchange (www.open-xchange.com) has welcomed seven million users to its messaging platform this year — a 80 percent increase, making Open-Xchange’s total worldwide user base surpass 15 million, and it to anticipate 26 million in 2010.
According to Open-Xchange’s Wednesday announcement, growth of the open-source collaboration platform has been driven by partnerships with software-as-a-service providers such as Versatel, Germany’s third-largest telecommunications provider with 1.3 million email accounts. Open-Xchange also made deals with domain name registrar Dotster, NameCheap, French web host Nexen-Alterway Hosting, and Asian SaaS distributor NTS. With the exception of NTS, all the others have replaced their existing webmail with Open-Xchange, adding additional groupware and mobility capabilities, along with new revenue opportunities.
“While we’ve made tremendous progress in sales and development in 2009, we expect to build on that momentum with a goal of reaching 26 million users in 2010,” Open-Xchange chief executive officer Rafael Laguna said in a statement. “There are very exciting deals in our sales pipeline and more social network features coming to our collaboration software. We’re really seeing the pace accelerating as we look ahead to next year.”
In a major milestone for the company, Open-Xchange introduced its innovative groupware concept, “Social OX,” which can aggregate webmail from Google, Yahoo and many others into a folder in Open-Xchange, plus automatically add and incorporate contact details from social networks such as Facebook, LinkedIn or Xing to the Open-Xchange address book.
Another major addition this year was OXtender for MacOS X, which lets end users access and edit all information and documents stored on the Open-Xchange server with their familiar desktop Mac applications. Plus, a free, open-source connector for email and news client Mozilla Thunderbird was made available this month.
The Open-Xchange OXtender for Business Mobility, released in 2009, lets users receive push email and synchronize contacts, calendar and other information from their Open-Xchange account to their smartphones, including iphone, BlackBerry, Nokia, Windows Mobile and others.
The company’s software has also been adopted this year on-premise by some 3,500 companies and organizations worldwide, including a large Japanese retail bank and Germany’s University Hospital Cologne.
Open-Xchange also announced several important partner agreements. Paving the way for greater integration of end users telephone, fax, instant messaging with Open-Xchange’s email, contacts, calendar and task information, with help from Rack-Soft and its Unified Communications software.
Also, SugarCRM, the world’s leading provider of commercial open-source customer relationship management software, announced cooperation with Open-Xchange to integrate data from SugarCRM and the Open-Xchange collaboration software as the first software to build on the social networking capabilities in Open-Xchange.
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