groupSPARK Welcomes Microsoft Announcement of Exchange Online and SharePoint
Online as Web-Based Services
- Microsoft's Expansion into the Hosted Services Market Validates the Use of
Industry-Leading Applications for SMBs as Hosted Services -
BURLINGTON, Mass., March 4 /PRNewswire/ -- groupSPARK, a Microsoft Gold
Certified Partner and the leading Software as a Service (SaaS) provider of
private label hosted messaging and collaboration services, announced today
that it welcomes Microsoft's further entry into the hosted services market
with the beta release of Exchange Online and SharePoint Online for small and
mid-size businesses (SMBs).
Microsoft's beta release of the Exchange Online and SharePoint Online
hosted services further validates groupSPARK's core vision: Microsoft Exchange
Server 2007 and Windows SharePoint Services v3 while being the best-in-class
messaging and collaboration applications are difficult for SMB's to setup and
manage and best utilized as hosted services. Additionally, Microsoft's
anticipated Q4 launch should have the effect of not only increasing the market
share of Exchange Server mailboxes from 135 Million worldwide, according to
the Radicati Group, but also cause many SMBs to look at hosted alternatives
such as Microsoft's and groupSPARK's offerings.
Microsoft's offerings, which seemingly compete with groupSPARK, are
incomplete at best, as they lack critical third party services such as
BlackBerry Enterprise Server -- this makes the Microsoft offering a non-
starter for most businesses. More importantly, the Microsoft Online services
will be sold exclusively through partners but without any partner branding.
The lack of partner branding reduces the partner's relationship with the end
customer as the customer realizes that the partner is not adding any value and
simply reselling a commodity service.
groupSPARK, on the other hand, is a best of breed provider and offers not
only current and previous versions of Exchange and SharePoint servers but also
access to critical non-Microsoft services such as BlackBerry Enterprise Server
for two way mobile synchronization as well as industry leading Postini for
spam and virus filtering and archiving services. Additionally, groupSPARK's
partner program empowers its partners to own and extend their customer
relationships by fully private labeling groupSPARK's offering under their own
name and brand -- the customers never realize that the ultimate provider of
the service is groupSPARK -- and thus create customer loyalty. To maximize
revenue, groupSPARK's resellers set pricing for all of their customers and can
even create custom hosted Exchange offerings to sell differentiated offerings
in the marketplace.
"We welcome Microsoft's new entry into the hosted services market and are
encouraged that SMBs will realize that hosted software services are a key tool
in increasing corporate productivity and growing their business," said Ravi
Agarwal, chief executive officer of groupSPARK. "Currently only 1.5
million(1) users use hosted Exchange worldwide. Microsoft's entry into this
market will cause awareness of hosted Exchange to grow and will cause this
market growth to accelerate. groupSPARK is uniquely positioned to help channel
partners to take advantage of this explosive growth opportunity and maximize
revenue."
About groupSPARK
Located in Burlington, Massachusetts, groupSPARK is a leading provider of
SaaS services, such as Microsoft Exchange Server, SharePoint Services, and
Dynamics CRM, which can be completely private labeled and resold by partners
as a part of their own product offerings saving hundreds of thousands of
dollars in development and support costs.
Its partners utilize groupSPARK's turnkey private label platform to
provide hosted services to their users in minutes. Partners are able to
address scalability and uptime concerns by leveraging groupSPARK's 100% uptime
SLA, live 24x7 U.S.-based support and proactive hardware and software
monitoring capabilities.
(1) Hosted Messaging Trends 2007-2010, Osterman Research, August 2007.
The names of actual companies and products mentioned herein may be the
trademarks of their respective owners.
SOURCE groupSPARK
Lisa Masiello of groupSPARK, +1-781-273-6248, ext. 652,
lmasiello@groupspark.com
