The cost of running and maintaining an in-house Exchange system for small companies is disproportionately high. This has led to a growing number of companies providing Exchange hosting services backed by Microsoft’s support for this market.

Hosting companies must add value both to differentiate themselves and to ease provisioning of services. Added-value services include virus and spam protection, mobile messaging, and archival services. Unified messaging is also likely to be added to the list as VoIP take-up expands.

Apptix is one such company making an aggressive push into this market, with its Tecos provisioning software being a major differentiator. The firm also appears to be one of the largest providers of hosted Exchange offerings. Apptix’s current Exchange-related revenues are around $15 million annually, and growing quickly.

An average service agreement is for less than 10 seats, and the basic service costs $9.95 per seat per month. Apptix also offers hosted SharePoint.

The requirement for hosted services at this level will continue to grow, but the cost savings are not so obvious for larger companies.

… John Stanners