Late last week we were greeted with the news that BT, the UK’s largest telecoms provider, is to drop Yahoo! as the provider of its email platform for over 6 million active email accounts. That’s a lot of users to lose in one fell swoop, but BT cited on-going security concerns as the reason for this declaration. This quickly follows a security breach in Japan which saw 22 million Yahoo! accounts compromised, adding to a very bad month of May for Marissa Mayer.

Email is still a critically important offering from service providers, and BT’s decision to change messaging platform on the grounds of security highlights this. Rather than compromise the integrity of subscribers’ data, BT has taken the difficult decision to migrate over 6 million email accounts, and should be applauded for putting the needs its customers first.

The key for service providers is to be able to offer a service that meets the demands of their customers – on every level – and by working with a large organisation such as Yahoo! they are restricted in terms of what changes they can make to the core email service. We are seeing a trend towards service providers moving away from over-the-top email offerings from Yahoo! and Google, with BSkyB being one of the few recent exceptions. There are numerous reasons for this, including control of the platform, privacy and security concerns, direct access to the customers, better user experience and better integration into other services – ultimately controlling your own fate.

Developing a custom email platform gives BT the opportunity provide a better experience for its users, however it runs the risk of criticism if this new offering falls short of the expectancy of its subscriber base.

It’s a critical time for BT, as they look to increase subscriber levels by offering a new premium sports channel for all subscribers, let’s see if they can get the basics right.

Open-Xchange has been active for quite a while in Asia engaging hosting and telco partners to resell Open-Xchange software as a sevice to their customers. With Netregistry, Australia´s largest domain name registrar and hosting provider we just signed a long-term agreement for up to 500,000 users.

The need for such a solution provider as Open-Xchange is further noted in the April 2013 Forrester Research, Inc., report from analyst Michael Barnes entitled SaaS Adoption Trends In Asia Pacific For 2013 And 2014. Across APAC, Michael sees SaaS “adoption is rapidly going mainstream across more and more markets in Asia Pacific and Japan (APJ).“ The opportunity for hosters, telcos and system integrators to build their SaaS business with OX App Suite is huge as Forrester confirmes that:

„Collaboration and email remain the most commonly used SaaS workloads in APJ

IT and business decision-makers agree that SaaS-based collaboration and email are widespread, but pronounced differences exist between countries. For instance, 64% of business decision-makers in Malaysia indicated that they use SaaS for collaboration and email. This is by far the highest in the region — nearly three times the adoption rate in Japan (22%) and more than twice that in Australia (28%). Usage in the Philippines and Indonesia is also significantly higher than the regional average.“

Want to learn more about OX App Suite?

Open-Xchange has established sales and technical presence in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia – or you visit us at WHD.india on May 27-28 in Mumbai!

It´s a pleasure to announce that Open-Xchange partner SpamExperts has organized “The Complete Service Provider Package,“ the largest giveaway in the history of HostingCon. The package will consist of separate service offerings to complete a prize pool for hosting providers which sets new records in terms of giveaways and value-creation for HostingCon participants.

Scheduled for June 17 – 19 in Austin, TX, HostingCon is the elite annual conference and trade show for the hosting services industry in the US. In line with the conference’s theme “Raise the Game,“ SpamExperts has initiated an unprecedented package of webhosting-centered services, where timely access to the right licences, software and benefits for a webhosting provider is the driving factor.

The package, co-sponsored by Open-Xchange and leading hosting and cloud enablement vendors, totals an amazing $65,000 in value, covering a range of hosting services including product licensing, security, filtering and support.

Visit the site below to review just what is part of the “The Complete Service Provider Package“ being offered in Austin next month:
http://www.spamexperts.com/en/news/spamexperts-organizes-65000-give-away-hostingcon-2013

We are looking forward to see you at HostingCon at the Open-Xchange booth #737!

By Jon McCarrick, Hosting Evangelist

HostingCon in Austin promises to be one of the most important events of the year for Open-Xchange.  If you have been following this blog or keeping an eye on the progress of Open-Xchange, you would know that we have a lot to show off at this year’s show.  We also plan a few surprises.

In March, we announced the general availability of OX App Suite, our next generation of software.  For those of you who see Open-Xchange as just an email and calendaring platform, welcome to a whole new world of opportunity.  Of course we still have great email and collaboration software, but today it sits on one of the finest SaaS delivery platforms on the market.  Built from the ground up using HTML5 and the latest java stacks,  OX App Suite is positioned to offer a single user experience for all of your HTML5 apps.  It uses responsive design elements to ensure a great user experience on a wide variety devices.

As a proof of our SaaS-iness, we also launched OX Text, our first office productivity app from our team of former Open Office developers.  Our roadmap , not surprisingly, includes a complete selection of office productivity apps.  We have worked hard to make a really great, brand-able, persistent web interface that will give small businesses the confidence to make your hosting company’s web interface their primary source of consuming apps of all sorts that will help them operate their business.

We will have a great booth (#737) right next to the Networking Lounge.  Please be sure to plan to stop by to pick your cool OX swag, get a demo of the new OX App Suite, and discover some of our really cool announcements that we will be sharing at the show.  Things to keep an eye out for are info relating to improvements in Cpanel, WHMCS, and Parallels integrations.

Please be sure to contact me if you plan to be at the show and we will arrange for a private sit down with our top management.  For easy followup- please reach me at:

Twitter: @jonmccarrick

Linkedin: jonmccarrick

We look forward to seeing you in Austin.

123-reg is the biggest domain registrar in the UK and part of Host Europe Group, the largest privately-owned hosting group in Europe with more than 1 million customers. Until last year they had their own email solution, and like other hosters, gave web-based email away for free within hosting packages. They had a large number of active email accounts, but were unable to sell them anything else.

Opportunity to upsell

The ‘lightbulb-moment’ for 123-reg was when they saw a demo of Open-Xchange: a product that could plug into their own infrastructure, that could easily migrate customers, and that wouldn’t take long to implement. Another key reason 123-reg partnered with Open-Xchange was because of the integrated ‘upsell layer.“ The upsell layer introduces a 24-hour sales channel. If someone uses email and clicks a particular option, a pop up appears that says ‘you don’t have this feature – would you like to try it for 30 days or buy it now?’ That was appealing to us,” says Wahid Aziz, Senior Product Manager at 123-reg.

Email is key for customer retention

123-reg has seen an increase in the number of people using their free email service. This is important Wahid Aziz says, because it is the start of their customers’ relationship with email, and lays the foundation for customer retention. “With email, we can take them all the way up until they are a medium business or an enterprise.”

Want to know more?

Read the full 123-reg success story
or email to frank.hoberg AT open-xchange.com

Guest Blog by Philbert Shih, Structure Research

Office 365 recently introduced capabilities for importing contacts to Exchange Online from popular social networks. The capability is called Connect and supports importing of contacts from LinkedIn and Facebook and integration with the Exchange Online address book. Right now LinkedIn is supported for users worldwide, while Facebook is currently only supported for US-based customers (efforts are well underway to support this capability worldwide).

Microsoft is not the first email platform to support pulling in of social network contacts. Open-Xchange has been doing this for several years now. Late or not, Microsoft is enabling something that will sooner than later be a must-have. The challenge for Microsoft is what else it can pull on to its platform. Google and Open-Xchange, for example, have transitioned email from a standalone service to a suite that manages and stores not just messages, but photos, music and documents. Both have also integrated tools for document editing and creation. Exchange remains a business-class email service but the blurring lines between work and personal make at least some degree of integration inevitable. Social media contacts is likely just the start.

*Disclosure: Microsoft and Open-Xchange are Structure Research subscribers.

By Jon McCarrick – @jonmccarrick

I was interviewed recently by the WHIR Magazine on the nature of a technology evangelist in the hosting industry. From my point of view “the job of any evangelist, whether it’s in a church or otherwise is to deliver some good news. It is to say, hey, my company, the company I’m evangelizing for, has really great news, and you ought to hear my news. My job is to go out and make sure you know all the good things that architect end of things that my company is doing.“

While the evangelist job is one that can differ quite a bit from company to company, there are plenty of common characteristics. An evangelist often lands at the intersection between marketing, sales and development. And in each of those areas, the evangelist can be tasked with delivering details and information in both directions – that is, bringing the company’s message to the customers, and bringing the customers’ ideas to the company – at the same time. In the case of development, an evangelist might be going out and listening to customers, collecting new feature requests and hearing criticism, and bringing those to the development team. At the same time, they might be bringing ideas from the dev team out to customers to vet. On the marketing end, they could be helping to deliver the company’s message, and to help the marketing team present a united message. At the same time, they could be helping to see customers’ requests for partner marketing support material, or helping to train partner sales teams. On the sales front, the evangelist may be out prospecting, but they’re also educating existing customers about new products.

There’s a give and take on all three of those vectors. As an evangelist you’re standing at the crossroads of all of them. So you’re right in the middle of the entire company’s business. You tend to be the go-to person for lots of questions. If you have questions about Open-Xchange and how we can help grow your business, feel free to reach out to me on Facebook or Twitter.

To read the full article, please visit http://digitalmagazine.thewhir.com/i/124989/24

Open-Xchange along with North Bridge and GigaOM Research are pleased to announce the 3rd Annual Future of Cloud Computing Survey!

This vendor-agnostic thought leadership initiative is the most widely endorsed in the industry and Open-Xchange is one of nearly 60 organizations involved in this initiative.

Here’s what we hope to learn from the survey with your help:

• Where the Cloud is making impact across the software eco-system at all levels from computing and development to the wide number of SaaS applications now in use.

• IT competitiveness and the critical issues around balancing IT and Business Needs.

• Drivers and Inhibitors to Cloud Adoption

• Software sectors and Industries that are being impacted by the Cloud

• Internal needs such as hiring, training, and operations that support the move to the Cloud

We invite you to be among the first to take the survey and share among your own network of Cloud thought leaders and customers. To see the 2012 survey results are available here.

Help us spread the word! Follow us on Twitter @FutureofCloud and use the hash tag #FutureCloud to join the discussion.