E-mail has increasingly become mission critical to the functioning of businesses of all sizes, and users have come to expect the same level of reliability from their e-mail systems as they do from their phone system. Every minute that e-mail is down represents lost time for employees unable to communicate with customers, vendors, and co-workers. An hour of downtime can easily result in thousands of dollars in lost productivity and revenue. Hosted service providers understand how important e-mail is to their customers, but realize that to do it, and do it right, takes a significant amount of time and resources which could be better spent focused on their core business. Private labeled services allow for outsourcing of the critical infrastructure component to Exchange experts while never losing control of the customer relationship.

In the simplest terms, it means the end customer never knows that your Exchange hosting solution is provided by a third party. If the provider offers true private labeling, everything the end customer sees will have your branding, logos, domains, and contact information on it, down to the RPC/HTTPS server name for Outlook. To the customer, you are their hosted Exchange provider. This is a powerful connection with the impact that Exchange has on a SMB customer; it can significantly improve their productivity, give them access to email, public folders, and calendars from anywhere in the world, and give them peace of mind that their data is secure and accessible 24x7.

The greatest benefit of private labeled services is that you own the relationship with your customer. Offering Exchange allows your company to begin to offer a variety of value-added services. Your customers now see you as a source for their expanding business needs. This change in the customer mindset is instrumental in driving loyalty and reducing churn.

If the private label partner supports n-tier reselling, you can sell hosted Exchange through your resellers and partners, and those resellers can in turn have their own resellers, with a reseller at any level being able to private label the offering for their customers or resellers.

True private label services have built an easy, automated process for getting up and running within minutes. The act of applying your branding to the control panel and other documentation that users will read is often as simple as cutting and pasting. You can copy information you need right from your own Web site, and the transition from your site to the hosted control panel will appear seamless.

The control panel is the key to successful private labeling of Exchange hosting. It enables customers to easily administer themselves, including adding and deleting users, giving key personnel mobility service, and changing each user’s current Exchange plan. Customers will also find an online answer center, and this important feature will help to cut down on support costs.

If you prefer to keep the customer experience within your existing portal or control panel, XML-based Web services offer deep integration. You can replicate the provisioning functionality directly into your own existing control panel to offer a seamless customer experience. Web services are also often used for obtaining billing information to serve a single invoice to your customers.

With up to 100% uptime service level agreements, you can immediately offer potential customers security that they will have solid and reliable service and access to their data at anytime from anywhere. This uptime guarantee will prove to be one of the most attractive selling points of the hosted Exchange service you offer.

In addition to building customer loyalty, you will be able to dramatically increase your average revenue per user. The standard POP3 mailbox is sold to the SMB market for a few dollars, or a few pennies, or even given away for free. POP3 e-mail accounts don’t offer much in the way of flexibility, and collaboration features are non-existent. Offering full hosted Exchange and all the benefits that come with it, including anywhere/anytime access, integrated collaboration features, and the knowledge that their data is securely managed by experts, provide a compelling case to upgrade their services.

Today, there are almost eight million SMBs worldwide. The total estimated number of PCs used by SMBs is 520 million globally. Assuming a conservative percentage of that group is interested in enterprise-level e-mail (seven percent), the target market is about thirty-six million mailboxes. It is estimated that the U.S. market is approximately 4.5 million mailboxes. All of these businesses are willing to pay for the advanced options provided in Exchange. Assuming these customers are willing to pay a median of $12 per month, then this business is projected to grow by more than $600 million over the next year.

If you have any interest in tapping into this market you have to look at your options. You can build it in-house, but there are inherent risks with this approach. Will you be able to find and retain the necessary experts with high volume Exchange Server experience? How long will it take and how much will the total solution cost? How many customers can you actually convert and is it enough to justify the costs of both building and maintaining it? A complete solution typically costs between $250,000 to $500,000, including the costs of the servers, enterprise grade SAN, Exchange experts, and Exchange monitoring solution.

The safer option is to partner with a private label hosted Exchange company. As previously discussed, this approach can get you up and running and selling hosted Exchange to your customers in minutes. There are a variety of options that allow you to go with a shared or dedicated server so you never spend more money than you can potentially make. In addition to the tremendous decrease in risk, the hosting company will be able to provide tier-2 support.

Some of the more forward-thinking private label hosted Exchange companies also enable you to create your own reseller program. This allows you to not only offer Exchange to your customer base but also expand your company to seek additional revenue streams with very minimal risk.

The market for hosted Exchange is huge and growing fast, and many companies are trying to take advantage of the opportunity. Hundreds of resellers already exist but they have only scratched the surface of the potential revenue. This is the time to be looking into offering hosted Exchange and considering the low-risk option of working with a private label provider.