subject: How Hosted Exchange 2010 Differentiates From Microsoft Exchange Online [print this page] Despite the recent hype around the launch of Office 365, Microsoft did not invent hosted Exchange.
There is a lot of buzz around the new Office 365 product that Microsoft started to offer. This is the not the first hosted service from Microsoft, but it were the hosting providers that started with hosted exchange in the first place.
Microsoft only offered the software, and hosting companies needed to deploy and manage any technical challenges, and work out solutions for how to provision mailboxes, billing issues and SLA management.
The hosted exchange market has changed tremendously over the last years and Office365 has now a huge presence in the market.
Although Microsoft still does a lot of the heavy lifting to assist hosting providers with offering exchange 2010, the hosting providers now have the challenge to sell exchange against the Office365 marketing beast.
To make matters worse, the Microsoft"s partner community is eager to resell Office 365 accounts, without the responsibility of billing and SLA's for smaller commissions.
The new challenge for hosting companies is how to differentiate their exchange 2010 in the new world of Office 365.
Sceptics and doomsayers say that it"s futile for hosted exchange providers to compete against the Office365
These prophets of doom say that its customers will leave hosted exchange providers and migrate to Office365 solely because it's more cost-effective.
But there are many hosting companies that are still confident and cheery. These exchange providers will look at Office 365 for weaknesses that can be exploited.
The first drawback of Office 365 is the "you can have as many colors as you like, as long as its black" approach.
In other words, companies that selected Office 365 do not have personalized support, and their specific requirements cannot be accommodated since Office365 cannot be customized to unique company's needs.
Microsoft"s assigns technical account managers to enterprise users only, but they don't have a huge amount of Office 365 expertise and are more focused on Microsoft's bottom-line.
Many hosted exchange providers offer differentiated exchange 2010 options that provide highly personalized service.
To give an example, companies that rely on public folders and many do, will have that functionality with hosted exchange providers, but when it comes to Office 365 they will lose this functionality.
Hosted exchange providers spend a lot of time and hard work, but selling a tailored exchange 2010 solution is a huge advantage. Hosting providers can develop customer relationships, and this is where business is won or lost. Pricing of mailboxes is under pressure with Office 365, but a quick look at hosted exchange providers will show that prices are quite competitive, varying from $6 and up. Exchange 2010 providers know that customers have no problem with paying a slight more per mailbox, if that gives them higher quality and individual support.
The cost per mailbox per month is definitely not the only and main driving factor.
Exchange 2013 is now already being offered by hosting providers, and Microsoft still continues to engineer and support this for hosting providers.
More features in exchange 2010 and exchange 2013 will appear over the years simply because Microsoft will continue to transform exchange. Exchange is heavily used in classic large IT infrastructures, and exchange is also at home in dedicated and shared data-centers.
New customer expectations have been set by Microsoft, people expect to pay less for a 25GB Exchange mailbox, but there are many reasons to still choose for hosted exchange providers.
by: Jessica Modi
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