Microsoft 365

Despite the recent hype around the launch of Office 365, Microsoft did not invent hosted Exchange. In fact, well before Microsoft got into the hosting business, other companies around the world were using versions as old as Exchange 5.5 to deliver a hosted email service for customers. Of course, in this era Microsoft didn’t do any engineering or make any other attempt within the product to help the hosting companies figure out how to deploy, manage, or evolve a shared messaging service and it was left to the hosting companies to work out solutions to many technical challenges, such as how to provision mailboxes, billing and reconciliation, SLA management, and so on. The world has now changed and Office 365 is a huge presence in the hosted Exchange market. To their credit, Microsoft has done a lot of heavy lifting in the engineering of Exchange 2007 and Exchange 2010 to make life easier for hosting companies (some would say that the advent of PowerShell support in Exchange 2007 was the single biggest advance). I also think that the Exchange development group has been pretty open with hosting companies as to what options exist – a look at Michael van Dijken’s August 8 post on Ian Hameroff’s blog gives some insight as to the messages that are flowing. This post follows a session at the recent Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference so you can take it that Microsoft is setting its stall out pretty well. However, nice as it is to open lines of communication, the downside that hosting companies now face is that they have to sell their services against the Microsoft marketing machine. In addition, Microsoft’s partner community is rapidly gearing up to sell Office 365 seats on a commission basis, further adding to the pressure within the marketplace. The question therefore for hosting companies is what should they do to prosper and grow their business in the new world of Office 365 where Microsoft sets the baseline expectation for customers in terms of the monthly cost of

byITPro Today