Date Published: May 2008.
Author: Claudio Vacalebre.
Soundtrack: For Test, Author: Claudio Vacalebre.
The Hosted Exchange marketplace has continued to evolve through consolidation, mergers and acquisitions and the need to provide high quality support has emerged as one of the key values in the Hosted Exchange Service Provider industry . As the market has evolved we see the impact of large providers driving consolidation of the operational segment of the business through “white label” services being resold by vertically-focused VARs and service providers that cannot invest the resources required to maintain world-class operations of the platform. As end customers are moving more and more to the hosted service model, it has become clear that proactive support and a close support relationship between the Service Provider and Microsoft are essential to the ability to deliver a high-quality, highly available service.
Microsoft has created three new support options that are tailored specifically for the Hosted Exchange Service Provider.
Based on the customer requirements for availability along with the need to provide high quality support to end customers, Microsoft will be discontinuing Professional per-incident support for MS Hosted Messaging and Collaboration and Hosted Exchange applications as of June 30, 2008, since the Professional offer does not include the proactive support elements required to maintain the high operational availability of the hosted Exchange platform.
In addition, Microsoft strongly encourages service providers that cannot achieve a customer base of several thousand MAPI seats to seriously consider shifting away from the operational aspect of the hosted Exchange business and explore working with one of our white-label exchange service providers that can be found at Catalog Solutions. Building a business that can achieve a customer base of several thousand MAPI seats is the minimum level to achieve profitability in running the hosted Exchange platform as a commercial service provider and partners that will not achieve this level of customer adoption would be significantly more profitable through a reseller arrangement with a large scale white-label provider.