by Jon McCarrick (guest blogger)
Just returning – a little bleary-eyed – from the cPanel Conference this week and I have to say, that the hundreds of customers we saw and had the chance to interact with in a classroom session (thanks Aaron) affirmed that OX is on the right path.What we heard a lot of was that Open-Xchange — the only premium webmail option for cPanel users with the ability to offer shared calendaring and file collaboration — is the solution to use (i.e. utilizing existing cPanel mail servers to avoid migration integration issues). Eyes were lightning up when we showcased how tightly OX is integrated with social networks –with LinkedIn for example – from within the OX interface; via our web-based desktop and mobile interfaces.
cPanel represents 20% of the websites in the world and 60% of the US hosting market and Open-Xchange had the opportunity to host a short classroom session on the ease of integrating OX. This hands-on session demonstrated how to install OX in hours, not days. The value of this knowledge transfer hit home even harder when our own Carsten Holger was able to demonstrate the point completely offline (internet connectivity was an issue).
The fact that a provider can offer a better web mail client and experience — that has the potential to create a new revenue stream — is extremely desired and point of differentiation for hosters and telcos using cPanel.Next year, the conference will be in New Orleans; the ‘OX Krew’ is already making plans to collect a maximum amount of beads!