The New BPOS

Microsoft have recently lowered the price of their BPOS offering, and are at a rapidly increasing rate adding new features and benefits.

Where does that leave the Exchange, and SharePoint hoster?

Microsoft are leaving out the middle of the market.

The middle market is hard: They have internal IT guys afraid for their jobs, some complex systems and are used to having account managers – someone to work with, and help them look like a hero to the business.

This is where there is opportunity. As a hoster you can take advantage of Microsoft’s massive advertising campaign. Every CEO, CTO and CIO will at least know about the hosting offering if not understand it. Due to your ability to customize to a customer’s specific requirements and host additional servers/software over and above Exchange and SharePoint you have a key point of differentiation.

You are supposed to be more expensive, you are offering local tailored services with a real understanding of the applications and requirements of your local market or vertical.
Hosting companies give excellent value for what they do:
Relieve the stress of maintaining hardware
Maintaining business critical applications in a cost effective manner
Offering a 99.999% uptime for often as little as $20 - $50 a month.
Offering expensive and complex applications traditionally only fully utilised by large enterprises to small and medium businesses as well as the enterprise market.
Providing a phone number and a face.

As a proven presence in the market – through either webhosting, being an ISP or perhaps a Managed Services Provider customers are likely to come to you first, over and above BPOS and Google.
Your willingness to engage the customer directly, rather than just a webpage will build the customers confidence and allow you to capture this market.
The market is clamouring for this sort of service. We have all heard customers ask about Virtual Desktops, Software as a Service and Hosted Exchange.

There is a huge market being marketed to by Microsoft – get on the gravy train.

Control Panel for HMC

The term "HMC" refers to the Microsoft solution for "Hosted Messaging and Collaboration" - essentially, HMC includes a hosting solution for Exchange, SharePoint and OCS. Release 4.5 was the last release of HMC and there will be no more.

The HMC solution only included a sample control panel, HMC did provide a code level abstraction layer to each of the hosted applications, this was called MPS - the Microsoft Provisioning Server. The sample control panel demonstrated how a control panel could be connected to MPS in order to automate provisioning and administration.

MPS along with HMC has reached end of life. Cortex is not built around MPS but still adds value to any HMC based environment. As an HMC control panel, Cortex can be brought in to manage an existing HMC infrastructure. Cortex has a proprietary provisioning engine that gives transparency to what it's doing, the ability to build custom provisioning processes, an easier route to adding more hosted services and much more flexibility around how you sell and manage your hosted services. It's flexibility and simplicity mean that if you choose Cortex now, you will be well placed for the changes coming with the new range of hosted Microsoft products.

Note that as a solution, much of HMC was about ensuring that an environment was suitably engineered to cope with scalable hosting - i.e. high volumes of users operating in a shared hosting environment. This was good work, it was well designed and tested and is still applicable. If an environment has been built following the HMC guidelines this will provide a sound platform for hosting.

Cortex is well proven in this field, we are a Microsoft Gold partner and have been working in the area of provisioning for 10+ years, Cortex has been selectd after in-depth technical comparisons by an increasing number of the worlds largest hosting providers over MPS based solutions.

In conclusion, if you are considering deploying an HMC solution, you will still need a control panel, but take a look at Cortex before investing in an MPS based solution that could need replacement in the next 12 months and will not have any more investment.