Wow, is it June already?! Somewhere between pushing the boundaries and San Francisco, I have had a moment to notice.
The year started with the addition of a chief operating officer, Carsten Dirks, to help manage our growing company and our goal of going from 42 million email accounts at the end of last year to 80 million this year.
And, we continue our trajectory with new customer wins that continue to validate our model and approach to communication and collaboration solutions:
NetArt, the leader in domain name registration and web hosting in Poland, with more than 500,000 usersUnoEuro, a leading Scandinavian hosting provider, with some 50,000 consumers and small businessesEndurance International Group – among the largest providers of domains, hosting and online services worldwide – with more than 2 million customers and 10 million email accounts
We are making good progress towards our goal, which really begs the question: Why are we so bullish and what factors are leading to Open-Xchange adoption?
After all, when it comes to email and collaboration software, we know we are competing in the Land of Giants – Microsoft, Google, and IBM (Lotus). Here are the big differences as I see them:
Our go-to-market is increasingly focused on service delivery partners like web hosting companies, telecom suppliers and system integrators.There is no fat client software because Open-Xchange (a child of the web age) gives users the freedom to access their personal and professional content via a web browser – or if they prefer, via their favorite email application software like Outlook, Apple Mail, or Thunderbird. By mobility support from Open-Xchange, users are connected wherever they are.Our roots are in open source software, so we very purposely build in connectors and hooks to integrate with everything – email client and server software, control panels, directory services, network protocols, and other data sources like LinkedIn, Xing and Facebook. Around here, we like to say we are “Ruthlessly Open.”
Part of our success lies in those differentiators and part, frankly, is because Open-Xchange is in the crosshairs of the most significant accelerators in technology – cloud computing, social networking and mobility. All of those are booming from every angle – technical advances, overall interest and customer spending. Just have a look at these rather astounding facts and figures in the Mashable article, “A Mobile Storm in the Cloud”.
I talked about all of this, too, at the recent Open Source Business Conference and invite you to have a look. We look forward to the days ahead in 2012 where you can count on us to deliver more ruthlessly open software that makes a big difference for our partners and users. As part of this effort, you’ll see us taking steps towards making Open-Xchange the platform for delivery of additional software-as-a-service applications to bring everything together on one web desktop for a unified user experience – across all devices.