Looking to make it more efficient and cost-effective for service providers to offer messaging and collaboration services, Microsoft Corp. today announced the Solution for High Volume Exchange. The service is designed to a enable xSPs to offer consumers, professionals and small businesses Internet messaging services at, as the name implies, high-volume prices.
Built on the Microsoft Exchange 2000 Server, the Solution for High Volume Exchange includes basic e-mail services — from POP3, IMAP and Web mail to integrated messaging and collaboration tools such as calendaring and scheduling — using the Outlook Web Access client.
On a single platform, Microsoft reports, service providers can offer services such as e-mail, calendaring, contacts, storage and hosting of vanity domain names (second-level domains) for a broader array of customer segments. For example, service providers can combine any of the services mentioned above with their current offerings such as asymmetric digital subscriber line (ADSL), broadband access and Web hosting. Because it’s based XML-based infrastructure, Microsoft said that the service also lays a foundation for future value-added services.
“Today’s announcement is a core component of the great partnership between Apptix, HP and Microsoft. The Solution for High Volume Exchange is one of the services that Apptix’s will offer as part of the HP Exchange on Demand business solution,” Ignacio Davila, product manager in Platform and Application Hosting on the Microsoft Network Service Provider team, told ASPnews. (See Apptix, HP Offer Exchange On Demand.)
Apptix, a private-label ASP that offers hosted Exchange to network service providers, said that the Solution for High Volume Exchange can save its customers 75 percent or more in upfront costs to deploy and deliver expanded Internet messaging services. “The flexibility of the solution enables our customers to add on services as needed, presenting upsell opportunities as consumers, professionals and small businesses demand greater features and functionality,” said Alex Hawkinson, CEO of Apptix.
Integrating Microsoft Operations Manager (MOM) and the Microsoft Provisioning System (MPS), the solution promises to help service providers improve levels of automation and customer self-service, reduce provisioning errors and improve reliability. MOM and MPS are designed to collect and measure critical service data, track performance against service levels and report on subscriber statistics to help manage services usage, delivery, billing and provisioning.
“Our service provider customers need and want a platform that reduces operational costs and has the capacity to scale their business and drive new revenues,” said Ron Eller, vice president, Solutions, HP Industry Standard Servers. “Partnering closely with Microsoft, we’ve scaled the solution to ensure that service providers can deliver the best services to their customers at the lowest possible cost.”
Eller said that by combining HP servers, consulting and integration services with Microsoft software, “We were able to scale over three million mailboxes in a single domain based on the solution.”
The Solution for High Volume Exchange will be available from HP or Microsoft Consulting Services.
Apptix, HP and Microsoft are all listed by ASPnews as Top 30 Service Enablers.
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