avatar Frank Hoberg, Executive VP - Sales

SAAS going Mainstream in APAC Region

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!

avatar Chris Latterell, VP Marketing Open-Xchange

Get a $65,000 Give-Away at HostingCon 2013

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!

avatar Jon McCarrick

HostingCon- See you in Austin

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.

 

avatar Frank Hoberg, Executive VP - Sales

Open-Xchange enables 123-reg to build revenue

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

avatar

Office 365 supports pulling in social media contacts

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.

avatar Jon McCarrick

Evangelism is a Profession

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

 

avatar Chris Latterell, VP Marketing Open-Xchange

Join the Cloud Conversation and make an Impact!

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.

avatar Jürgen Geck, Consultant, Open-Xchange

A Short History of Openness

Software used to be a necessity to sell computer hardware, and it was Bill Gates and Steve Jobs who were the early pioneers, leading the monetization of software with the introduction of the licenses and patents with which we are familiar today. The last few years has seen a shift in power from this traditional base towards companies like Facebook and Google. The licence has been usurped as the most powerful tool for software monetization by personal data. Apple is still the king of luxury hardware, and Microsoft still owns the API to most operating environments and end user software worldwide, but Facebook owns our family pictures. And Google owns what we do on the Internet. In the words of Eric Schmidt, Google CEO: “We don’t need you to type at all. We know where you are. We know where you’ve been. We can more or less know what you’re thinking about.”

So where does open source come into the picture?

In 1989, Richard Stallman wrote the GPL, and enabled Linus Torvalds‘ Linux to grow to ubiquity. Without Linux, there would be no Facebook, no Google, no Android, and no Amazon Web Services. Open source software underpins the web and cloud as we know it today, and closed, proprietary systems would never have allowed the web to grow to the scale it is at today.

If you were a PC user in the 1990s, running a Windows environment, built with Borland C++, and networked by Novell products, possibly with a Netscape Browser on top, then the most influential piece of software on your machine would have been Microsoft‘s Windows operating system. Fast forward to today and you are likely running most of your work on top of another platform entirely, the Internet itself. You are no longer tied down to a specific device, operating system, or even browser.

But there is only one Facebook. And one Google.

Apple‘s defeat in its mapping disaster was only marginally due to the quality of its service. Apple executives had not considered that what they are up against is so much more than a map. An accurate map can be freely bought from any number of navigation systems manufacturers. What Google had and Apple did not was a virtual image of the world, and the Google users that populate it. And even a company with $150Bn in the bank could not match this. We are in an age where data has become more powerful than money.

The troublesome fact is that Google, enabled by and running on open source, is a private company. And its position, carrying the world’s data is, unique. Even with dataliberation.org, a fantastic service offered by Google, to give away all the data anybody could wish for, where would we put it?

Openness requires data, but also the ability to manage it. And Google’s data is just so much more than anybody could replicate, and as a result, nobody else is in a position to replace them.

The only other player coming close to Google in the data stakes is Facebook, but what those arguing for privacy on Facebook don‘t seem to understand is that all of the data on Facebook belongs to Facebook. Their terms grant Facebook the rights to anything we upload to their service and what this means is that by deleting our Facebook presence, we are only terminating our end of the deal. Facebook’s primary asset is user data, and no public company will ever throw away anything which makes them valuable in the first place.

What Facebook and Google have done is create highly polished products and services, for the most part freely available, and made it attractive to populate their systems with your data. They have created online personal portals that define how you interact with the internet. To their users, they have become almost like a personal cloud; the truth is, however, that they are anything but personal.

So openness must be found elsewhere. And the simple answer is that we must be prepared to be in control of our own resources. We are prepared to spend heavily on hardware, but less so on services that we use every day that define our computing experience. He who pays the piper calls the tune, and we can use these resources to store our data, and to manipulate, share, delete, and keep it private at our discretion. The key to this is the ability to run the software we buy on more than one platform, locally via your browser.

This is the foundation of openness. Not openness to overcome the PC ecosystem, but an openness for end users. In Apple and Facebook and Google there is no openness.

avatar Jon McCarrick

Coming to a town near you

Open-Xchange just returned from Phoenix where we sponsored The Whir Networking Event at the Mint in Scottsdale.  We at Open-Xchange love these events because it allows us to meet with customers and prospects that might not go to other kinds of events.  If you were there on Thursday night, you were in crowd of over 100 of the top professionals in the industry.  Besides great drinks and food, we also had some great networking time and cool door prizes. The winner of the Open-Xchange iPad Mini was Brian Krausse of GoDaddy.

We plan on having a presence at all the Whir Events for the remainder of this year and it is likely that we will be coming to a town near you.  We always plan additional time before or the day after these events to visit with local customers.  If we are coming your way, please reach out to us and we will schedule some time to visit with you either at your office or over a cold beer.  See below the jump for our upcoming schedule.

Also, if you are looking to see a little more about Open-Xchange but cannot make it to an event, please be sure to catch our Webinar Wednesdays.

Upcoming Whir Events:

Register at http://www.thewhir.com/whir-events

  • May 16, 2013 Toronto, ON
  • May 23, 2013 Frankfurt, DE
  • May 30, 2013 London UK
  • July 18, 2013 Denver CO
  • August 23, 2013 Washington DC
  • October 24, 2013 Los Angeles, CA
  • November 14, 2013 Houston, TX

Also, be sure to catch us in June at HostingCon in Austin TX and October at the cPanel Conference in New Orleans, LA

Follow me on twitter: @jonmccarrick

 

avatar Chris Latterell, VP Marketing Open-Xchange

How Software can Learn from Retail

I was in a London retail store last week and just had to ask the blue-shirted Apple employee: “how many retail associates do you normally have working here?“ He went on to say that this was light traffic for midday, but on average, roughly 100 trained staff were on site engaging customers.

That’s 100 people; 125+ when the store was really humming with people in search of their next cool digital life gadget. That is over 100 different access points to connect human curiosity with meaningful customer experience. Content – in the form well designed hardware – and context – in the form of easy to use software that interacts with one’s digital life and data – currently rule the day as they allow us to connect in real time.

Not a Single Check-out Lane in Sight

Next to me was a younger professional looking to buy 7 iPad Minis. One table over, a woman was asking how the iPad could help her be more productive at home and on the go. The time it took to make their purchases and be on their way was 1/10th the amount of time they spent exploring products and having their questions answered by eager Mac Specialists. Retail is being transformed by what brings people into a store: focus on the experience versus the check-out process. Understanding where your customer’s ’point of emotion’ is and intuitively putting value in front of them increases their willingness to pay. This combination–of digital integration of product and immediate gratification–has never been as powerful as it is today and software enables it all.

For software, these points of emotion are connected by properly placing in-application triggers across software, when and where people are most likely to be. In today’s largest countries, these “locations“ you can see are in email and social computing. At Open-Xchange, we develop software that has this principal at the heart of the products and services we deliver. Just like surfing the web, easily clicking on links in context of someone’s unmet need fufills the curiosity and immediate need users are demanding. And SaaS-based models are leading the way as they fulfill the long tail of retail for many industries and business.

With Open-Xchange, the foundation for service providers to utilize and leverage the value of their customer base and brand is found in our flagship product OX App Suite. Have a customized VOIP App to upsell your users? Want to offer more storage to users exactly when they are looking for it? Imagine having 100 different check-out lanes across context and branded sales opportunities.

If leading software envagelist Mark Andreessen’s comment on the “pre-death of retail“ pans out, it will be a disruptive next few years that should crank out more than 5% of ecommercing that is currently “eating“ into retail sales. And it is velocity, not only speed, that will be the guiding factor of the winning business models.