What does hosted Exchange mean for Web hosting companies?

Web hosting is a difficult industry, with prices and customer loyalty both on the decline. Most Web hosting companies are expanding their service offerings to fight these trends, and many of them are looking to offer hosted Microsoft Exchange services.

Research confirms that the vast majority of small businesses do not have sophisticated email, with mobile access and sharing of calendars, contacts and files. This leaves enormous growth potential for an offering that meets those needs.

The challenge for Web hosts, however, is the same as that of your small and medium-sized business customers: in order to offer an effective Exchange service, you have to invest large amounts of capital in the hardware and software, then manage the systems, maintain the equipment and the network and also support end-users.

The total cost over the first year, can easily exceed $100,000, which is both a large risk and also a difficult investment to recoup.

There is now an alternative, however: a number of hosted Exchange providers now offer private or white label partner programs, which allow you to sell your customers the latest hosted Exchange services, under your own brand, but without having to invest heavily in infrastructure, software and specialist personnel.

These private label programs offer the same infrastructure that the providers’ own customers use, with clustered servers, SAN storage, guaranteed uptime and all of the latest features of Exchange, badged as your own service.

The suppliers also provide marketing materials, sales coaching and level two support, which is handled by their own in-house support teams with specialist knowledge.

There is more information about Microsoft Exchange 2007 here.

Hosted Exchange : Build in House versus Hosted Exchange Outsourcing?

Read here for our guide on Exchange Hosting - When it makes sense for small businesses