First Annual Intermedia Partner Conference Brings Together Intermedia and its Premium Partners to Share Roadmap and Vision for the Future of SaaS
2009-03-11
Intermedia, the leading software-as-a-service (SaaS) provider specializing in messaging and collaboration solutions held its inaugural Partner Conference last week at Microsoft's Northeast regional headquarters in New York City. Sponsored by Microsoft, LiveOffice, RIM and Dell, the conference brought together 50 of Intermedia's top strategic partners to discuss the future of SaaS and how Intermedia and its partners can work together to deliver SaaS 2.0 to the SMB (small and medium-size business) community.
Intermedia's Partner Program enables IT solution and managed services providers to private label Intermedia's hosted Microsoft Exchange and Dynamics CRM environments, along with its award-wining HostPilot control panel as their own to deliver turnkey services and solutions to their SMB customers. Intermedia has more than 3,000 active partners, 50 of which were invited to attend this event. The conference focused on the challenges partners face in migrating customer environments to SaaS-based environments as well as integrating SaaS with on-premise technologies.
"This was a highly successful event for Intermedia," said Intermedia CEO, Serguei Sofinski. "We spent a full day listening to direct feedback from our partners on how SaaS plays into their managed services strategy and how they foresee Intermedia helping to bridge the chasm between on-premise and hosted technologies. Our product roadmap plays heavily into the tenets of what we've termed 'SaaS 2.0' and it was exciting to have our partners validate our vision."
For Intermedia, SaaS 2.0 - the moniker for the next generation of SaaS solutions - focuses on integrating hosted software with businesses' existing on-premise technologies to create a seamless, end-to-end IT solution. This allows businesses to deploy each solution in the way that works best for them, without creating silos or managerial complexity. One such technology, UserPilot, which allows solution providers to integrate their customers' Active Directory with Intermedia's Active Directory for centralized and simplified user and policy management, was featured at the conference.
"Intermedia's Partner Conference was a great opportunity to share ideas and strategies for moving forward in the managed services and SaaS space," said Jeff Cornejo of Blue Ridge InternetWorks, an Intermedia partner and managed services provider based out of central Virginia. "It provided a unique opportunity to speak with other IT service providers about real life examples of how their customers are seeing SaaS and how Intermedia's vision fits into the real world."
The conference also enabled interactions among Intermedia's new partners with its key ecosystem partners, including Microsoft, LiveOffice, RIM and Dell.
"Sponsoring this event was more than worthwhile for Microsoft," said Perry Cantor of Microsoft. "Software as a Service (SaaS) is an increasingly important delivery model for small businesses and the conference provided quite a bit of insight into it, how it is evolving and should be leveraged and deployed in the future."
To learn more about Intermedia's Partner Program, please visit www.Intermedia.net/Partners.