Open-Xchange continues its channel push as an open source alternative to Microsoft Exchange. The latest news: UK cloud service provider iomart Group will be migrating 300,000 e-mail accounts to their platform. Unlike last week’s news, though, iomart won’t be stopping at webmail — iomart Group will be hosting every aspect of the Open-Xchange groupware and collaboration platform.

The key to the Open-Xchange platform is their belief that mail is the easiest, cheapest part of any collaboration platform offering. To that end, Open-Xchange offers many opportunities for upselling value-added services on top of the core offering. That includes everything from so-called “Social OX” social network integration to smartphone sync and push capabilities.

It’s clearly an approach iomart Group agrees with. Here’s what iomart Group CTO Bill Strain had to say in a prepared statement:

“In our pilot, we were impressed with the ease in which Open-Xchange integrated in our own infrastructure and with its deployment capabilities. The groupware is rich in features and enables us to offer our customers a totally flexible, affordable model allowing feature choice on an individual basis.”

Just last week, Open-Xchange signed three hosted messaging providers over to their platform, and we’re starting to see a pattern forming. Open-Xchange promises more channel moves in 2011, so keep watching TalkinCloud for updates.

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