How do you differentiate in the highly competitive cloud email market? For Apptix, the answer involves focusing hosted Exchange on a few core vertical markets: Health care, financial services and legal. “Our biggest priority is developing the right solutions — with corporate compliance in mind — for those three verticals,” said Joy Nemitz, chief marketing officer at Apptix, one of the industry’s larger providers of hosted Exchange.
Nemitz shared some Apptix strategy with me during the Parallels Summit earlier this year in Orlando. But Apptix hasn’t sat still since that time. Apptix has also:
- worked closely with Quest Software to migrate on-premise Exchange, SharePoint and unified communications customers to the cloud. So far, Apptix has leveraged Quest’s software to migrate more than 200,000 users onto Apptix this year.
- inked a relationship with CMIT Solutions of Central Rhode Island — a managed services provider. So far, Apptix has migrated more tham 1,500 CMIT Solutions of Rhode Island users to Apptix services — including Microsoft Outlook, Entourage and Outlook Web Access.
The Quest and CMIT Solutions of Central Rhode Island relationships are strategic for multiple reasons. In the past year, Quest has aggressively expanded its channel and partner engagements — promoting virtualization and managed services tools (such as PacketTrap MSP) to solutions providers.
Meanwhile, CMIT Solutions of Central Rhode Island is part of a larger MSP and VAR franchise. If the Central Rhode Island organization has a positive experience with Apptix, it’s safe to say more CMIT Solutions franchises will give Apptix hosted services a look. “We’ve achieved operational excellence,” Nemitz told me during Parallels Summit earlier this year. “Now we need a strong go-to-market.”
The Quest and CMIT relationships certainly to strengthen Apptix’s relationships with VARs and MSPs. Still, Apptix faxes plenty of competition — even in its core vertical markets. Microsoft itself is preparing to roll out Office 365 — the forthcoming successor to Business Productivity Online Suite — sometime this year. And hosted Exchange rivals like Intermedia, MessageWire and Rackspace have strong followings in the MSP community.
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