Intermedia, Ingram Micro Seismic Team on Hosted Exchange
If you’re an MSP trying to decide whether to cooperate or compete with Microsoft’s SaaS offerings, here’s another avenue for you to consider: Ingram Micro Seismic, the master managed service provider, has inked a co-marketing and sales agreement to offer Intermedia’s hosted Microsoft offerings — including hosted Exhange 2007, SharePoint and Dynamics 3.0. Here’s a closer look at Ingram Micro Seismic’s overall strategy, Intermedia’s business model and the emerging Microsoft SaaS industry.
If you’ve been watching Ingram Micro Seismic closely you’ll notice that the organization increasingly promotes multiple options across its service portfolio.
For instance, on the remote monitoring and management front, Ingram Micro Seismic offers both Level Platforms and Nimsoft. And now in the hosted Exchange arena, Ingram Micro Seismic offers both mindSHIFT groupSPARK and Intermedia. I suspect we’ll hear more from the Seismic folks during the Ingram Micro VTN (VentureTech Network) conference, being held this week in Denver.
Who Is Intermedia?
Meanwhile, Intermedia is both cooperating and competing with Microsoft in the SaaS market. On the one hand, Intermedia requires continued access to Microsoft’s applications. But on the other hand, Intermedia is working hard to compete with Microsoft’s own Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS) strategy — which involves Hosted Exchange, Hosted SharePoint and other Microsoft applications moving into the cloud.
Intermedia claims to offer the world’s largest Exchange service, hosting more than 225,000 Microsoft Exchange mailboxes. The company says it has offered private label Exchange hosting since 2001 and has more than 4,000 partners. Intermedia’s sums up its channel strategy by stating:
Resellers can increase their recurring revenue with high margin Exchange hosting services they sell to their current customers and use to win new business – all under their own brand – while Intermedia maintains, monitors and upgrades the hardware and software.
More Than Hosted Exchange
Still, this is more than a Hosted Exchange strategy for Ingram Micro Seismic and Intermedia. No doubt, Intermedia has been pushing hard into the Hosted SharePoint and hosted unified communications markets.
At the same time, Microsoft continues to ramp up its own BPOS and Windows Azure cloud/SaaS strategies.
Intermedia insists that it will stay ahead of Microsoft’s BPOS efforts — especially as VARs and MSPs work to determine whether to build, buy or partner their way into the hosted Microsoft applications market.
Still, the hosted Microsoft applications market is getting very crowded. Fusepoint, with offices in Vancouver, Toronto, Montreal and Quebec City, in September launched SharePoint managed hosting services along with application development tools for the software. Other companies hosting SharePoint include Apptix, Intermedia, Rackspace Hosting and SherWeb Inc., just to name a few.
If you’re still not sure which path to take, the folks at Ingram Micro Seismic are hoping to attract your attention.
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I have been reselling Intermedia for several years. The white label/reseller features are excellent and the uptime has been unbeatable. Still Microsoft has everyone trumped with the “Sign On” App. We are looking at moving customers out of our white label offering and over to MS just to improve the user experience.
The Directory Link software from Intermedia works great, syncing passwords and usernames down to the client’s server… and it’s free. Unfortunately whenever the user changes their password you have to reconfigure the whole profile to avoid the password prompt when opening Outlook.
I would be excited to hear about any exchange hosting company who is taking advantage of the sign on API Microsoft put out.
Andy M: We’ll be sure to ask Intermedia about the sign-on API you mention. I must concede I’m not familiar with that particular development but we’ll get some answers for you.
Andy,
How long have you been hosting with Intermedia?
Can’t say we have had the same experience. Even
though we have phone numbers and emails to key
people in the organization. We often hear no
response from our relationship manager or the
VP of the Private Label Reseller group.
We have working with them since 2006 (Reseller No5) and can’t wait to migrate off.
Their development team constantly breaks things in the Control Panel and has a lack of urgency to clear issues. We often don’t find out about it until a customer calls with an issue. We then login to the control panel to investigate and things are changed, broken, or greye-out to the point that even if we call into support
the support team can’t make the changes.
If it were not so time consuming and risk prone to migrate our customers off (some of our customers have 30GB of storage) we would
have done it sooner.
If you are starting out offering Hosted Exchange, I would not start with Intermedia as your partner.
Andy and Ty,
Thank you both for your feedback. We value your partnership and would very much like to speak to you regarding the concerns that you have. Customer support and service are of utmost importance to us. Please call us on our private label client relations line at 800-379-7729, option 6.
Intermedia assigns a “Partner Development Executive” which will contact you a few times a year to see if there are any opportunities they can help you close.
However, they don’t seem to be so reachable when issues need to be escalated – when you need them the most. I cement my comments earlier about Intermedia’s attention to resolving issues with the PLR’s directly with Curt’s reply to call the generic PLR Customer Support number.
In actuality, Curt Mark (above) is assigned to our account. Not sure why Curt is reluctant to “step out” into the social media space with his full name.
On a more positive note regarding Intermedia….
For all VAR’s looking to offer Hosted Exchange the reality of the matter is many of the Hosted Exchange Providers have issues with their systems and infrastructure.
While we have had issues with Intermedia’s uptime in the past (several in a row in early ’09) the past 6-8 months have been very solid.
Out of the providers in the market, Intermedia is the “grey back” of Hosted Exchange and continues to roll out innovative solutions like their AD link and try to be “first to market” with their recent launch of Hosted Exchange 2010.
I will admit my earlier comment in October was more a “rash reaction” to the pain amp; cost we experienced after they made
an upgrade to their PLR control panel and took a week to clear
the issue with very limited feedback as to the cause or status.
If you are looking to start offering Hosted Exchange services, Intermedia will be your best partner.
Ty Bohannon
Chief Technology Advisor
LinkedIn Profile: http://www.linkedin.com/in/tybohannon
TwitterBizCard: http://TwtBizCard/SwiftPoint
Microsoft was very clear that they will not support Exchange 2010 RTM for hosters, Intermeida’s current hosted Exchange 2010 is not supported by Microsoft.
As a SLA and hoster myself, MS would not allow licenses of a product not supported. So to say vendors are selling hosted solutions without Microsoft’s support is silly.