Open-Xchange, which provides open source groupware and messaging solutions, has announced a partnership with STRATO, Europe’s second-largest web host services provider, to bring hosted cloud services to Germany, the Netherlands, Spain, the United Kingdom, France and Italy.

Over the next five months, no few than 5 million STRATO webmail accounts will be migrated completely to Open-Xchange’s AJAX-based web-based e-mail, calendaring and contacts platform, according to the press release. Users will be able to completely migrate contacts and information from social networks including Facebook, LinkedIn or Xing, as well as e-mail from services including Gmail or Yahoo! Mail.

Continuing with Open-Xchange’s overall strategy, STRATO will be offering the basic webmail for free, but a self-service panel gives customers the option to jump up to premium offerings at any time, such as the full groupware package or the mobile device-enabled version of Open-Xchange.

According to Open-Xchange, this announcement brings the company up to 24 million mailboxes hosted on its platform, giving it market leadership in the hosted groupware market. TalkinCloud will be watching for more milestones from the Germany-based Open-Xchange as it competes with the newly launched Microsoft Office 365 cloud suite worldwide, so stay tuned.

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