Mar, 2011 : Open-Xchange Partners with Host Europe Group

📅 March 23, 2011 - Host Europe Group enters into cloud application market with plans to launch business-class e-mail, enhanced collaborative and mobility features.

Open-Xchange, a provider of open source collaboration software, yesterday announced a partnership with Host Europe Group, a web hosting company, to bring free Open-Xchange webmail and Personal Information Management (PIM) to more than 1.4 million e-mail accounts.

The company mentions that by the end of 2011, Host Europe Group will consolidate its existing webmail solutions such as Atmail, Roundcube and SquirrelMail by replacing them with AJAX-based Open-Xchange webmail, providing end users with the most powerful e-mail service available today. At no additional charge, customers of the Host Europe Group will get modern, easy-to-use integrated e-mail, calendar and contact management. In addition, customers will be able to upgrade easily and take advantage of more advanced groupware features and mobility support.

It avers that Host Europe will use Open-Xchange Hosting Edition, the groupware specifically designed to meet the needs of SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) providers. Open-Xchange can be easily integrated into existing infrastructures without changing the existing e-mail servers, including authentication, user management, system administration, provisioning and billing tools.

According to the company, Open-Xchange integrates e-mail, calendar, contact and task management with advanced groupware features such as information management and document sharing, along with cutting-edge social network integration. By adding the Open-Xchange mobility capabilities, users can receive push e-mail and synchronization of contacts, calendar and other information from their Open-Xchange account to their smartphones, including iPhone, Android-based devices, Nokia, Windows Mobile and others.

It states that in addition, Open-Xchange's unique 'Social OX' features give users the ability to consolidate any kind of existing webmail accounts - for example from Google and Yahoo - into a folder in Open-Xchange so they can be managed more easily. Plus, contact details from social networks such as Facebook, LinkedIn and Xing can be added automatically to the Open-Xchange address book - giving users easy access to the latest contact information within their personal network. Also, users can now integrate messaging feeds from Twitter and Facebook and merge their calendar and address books from Google into Open-Xchange, as well.

"Communication and collaboration are leading the way for the adoption of cloud applications within SOHOs (small office and home office) and SMEs (small- and medium-size businesses)," said Rafael Laguna, CEO of Open-Xchange. "As e-mail and shared web hosting become a commodity, communication services and business applications based on Open-Xchange are great opportunities to provide customers with value-added services."

"Open-Xchange is the ideal partner for us to start offering cloud applications as their software integrates perfectly into our existing hosting infrastructure. It enables our customers to upgrade to the free webmail service, and offers state-of-the-art communication and collaboration features at a very competitive price," said Thomas Vollrath, CEO of Host Europe Group. "After looking at other solutions, we found that Open-Xchange was clearly the market leader, as it was the only supplier that could make it easy for us to introduce new premium features to our customers, by utilizing their 'in-app' upsell concept."