Cements Hosted Communications Market Leadership
2010-02-04
Intermedia, the world’s largest Microsoft Exchange hosting provider, today reported a 20 percent increase in year-over-year revenue and a 15 percent increase in the size of its customer base. The company attributes this growth to its continued focus on the customer experience, including development of its new DataEcho™ architecture that guarantees the safety and availability of customers’ Microsoft Exchange data.
In 2009, Intermedia was the first to market with hosted Exchange 2010, launching the service moments after Microsoft announced the availability of its Exchange Server 2010 software. Eighty-two percent of Intermedia’s new customers are choosing hosted Exchange 2010 over hosted Exchange 2007, which Intermedia continues to offer. Intermedia also made substantial investments in the service, support and proprietary technology it delivers around hosted Exchange and other communications services, a key source of the company’s differentiation versus niche hosting players and online service providers. Milestones included:
- Reaching 225,000 premium hosted Exchange seats: Intermedia is the world’s largest hosted Exchange provider.
- The first SaaS industry 100 percent data protection guarantee: Intermedia guarantees that customers’ email and other business-critical data stored in Exchange are fully protected in any eventuality. Intermedia is able to credibly offer this guarantee, which is enforced by stiff financial penalties, because of the proprietary DataEcho architecture the company developed to work with hosted Exchange 2010.
- Addition of fourth US datacenter: Intermedia opened a new East coast datacenter featuring multiple Tier-1 Internet provider connections and hardware from Cisco, Dell and EMC – investments that assure high reliability and the fastest round trip for email. Exchange 2010 customers are able to choose among Intermedia’s East and West coast datacenters for the location of their mailboxes, further accelerating round trip times for email.
- New features for greater customer control over the Exchange environment: Intermedia added new features to its proprietary HostPilot® Control Panel that further enable Exchange administration to be delegated to non-technical staff. These features included remote device management, which enables customers to remotely wipe data from a lost BlackBerry in just a few clicks. Intermedia also developed UserPilot – a product that enables clients to unify log-in capabilities across their hosted Exchange and on-premise Microsoft applications.
- Continued excellence in reliability and customer support: Average 2009 speed-to-answer for 24x7 phone-based customer support was under 60 seconds. Intermedia continued to offer a service level guarantee for 99.999 percent availability, which is less than six minutes of downtown a year.
- Expanding reseller network to over 4,000 private label partners: The number of partners and affiliates reselling Intermedia to their own customers substantially increased. Intermedia also extended its partner program to Latin America and inked a North American distribution deal with Fortune 100-ranked Ingram Micro.
“Small and mid-size businesses demand enterprise communications capabilities that are incredibly simple to set-up and reliable to use,” says Serguei Sofinski, chief executive officer, Intermedia. “To deliver that kind of experience, we invest heavily in our premium infrastructure, support, HostPilot Control Panel and Exchange Concierge™ migration service. We will continue to make these investments in 2010.”