February 12, 2008 – (HOSTSEARCH.COM) – US IP-based managed services provider Cbeyond (http://www.cbeyond.net) and Microsoft (http://www.microsoft.com/) have partnered on a new email service designed for small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs). The announcement was made at the Mobile World Congress 2008. The service is currently available in Atlanta, USA and will be available in the US cities of Chicago, Dallas, Denver, Detroit, Houston, Los Angeles, Miami, San Diego and San Francisco in the future.
The service includes support for mobile devices and is part of a bigger communications package catering to SMBs. The package offers “hardware and air time for mobile phone service, local and long-distance phone service, T-1 broadband Internet access, and, now, enterprise-class email based on hosted Microsoft Exchange”.
“By working with Microsoft, we can now offer Cbeyond’s customers the first hosted service based on Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 that is fully integrated with mobile access, all from a single provider,” said Brent Cobb, vice president of product marketing for Cbeyond. “We’ve seen significant customer demand for this service; delivering a seamless, enterprise-class messaging and collaboration experience to our SMB customers will give them the ability to compete using services traditionally reserved for large enterprises.”
Hosted Microsoft Exchange enables users to maintain shared Microsoft Office Outlook on desktops and laptops, web browsers, or smartphones – all simultaneously updated. Cbeyond customers will “enjoy the basic benefits of Hosted Microsoft Exchange” and, for a fixed monthly fee, be able to upgrade to mobile access, shared calendar, shared contacts, and receive a free copy of Microsoft Office Outlook 2007.
“SMBs today want the same productivity tools and capabilities that enterprises have long enjoyed, and they often look to a single source that can easily and cost-effectively address their full range of communications requirements,” explained Microsoft’s General Manager of the Communications Sector, Mr. Michael O’Hara. “By working with a service provider like Cbeyond, SMBs are able to really focus on their most important priorities — serving their customers and growing their business.”
“The SMB market continues to be vastly underserved from a technology perspective despite improved network reliability and decreased operating costs,” said Will Stofega at IDC. “The new Cbeyond service addresses many of the pain points that have kept SMBs from adopting corporate-class IT tools; it provides familiarity and ease of use with Microsoft applications, it has a low cost of entry and it is packaged with other popular communication services for simplified billing and management.”
