What a great discussion it was on stage there in Orlando at the Parallels Summit…7 of some of the most interesting cloud providers and enablers in the industry talking about the exploding market opportunity for service providers delivering applications to SMBs. The panel included Open-Xchange CEO, Rafael Laguna, plus executives from 1&1, eNom, KPN, Microsoft, Symantec and Verisign and was moderated by Structure Research analyst, Phil Shih.
Laguna pointed out that in recent years Open-Xchange has experienced 100 percent annual increases in its number of users driven by cloud implementations. Moderator Shih asked how we accelerate this market momentum. That is why service providers are in exactly the right position as trusted solution providers for SMB customers, said Laguna. He continued: it would serve the big players like Google to help open doors by creating awareness around exact SMB benefits the cloud delivers, but it is the service providers and their existing relationships with SMBs that are in the best position to capitalize.
Picking up on this point, Oliver Mauss, CEO of 1&1 Internet, advised his fellow service providers to find the right moment to present the opportunity for add-on applications. “Profile your customers so you are ready with the right offer,” Mauss stressed, and was spot on.
That is the philosophy behind the next version of Open-Xchange — provide a platform for integrating applications so that our service provider partners can make those available to their customers. That creates multiple occasions to sell and deliver additional apps. Tier1 released a good overview of this in a recent report; you find it here.
At Open-Xchange, our approach to agile development and flexible engagement models with partners is multiplying the change we now see within the cloud industry and, accelerating the way people work.