TARRYTOWN, N.Y., and RAPPERSWIL-JONA, Switzerland, Sept. 19 /PRNewswire/ -- Open-Xchange Inc., the leading provider of open source collaboration software, announced today a new strategic partnership with Hostpoint AG, the leading hosting provider in Switzerland. Later this year, Hostpoint will replace the webmailer for their 250,000 email accounts with a new webmail module from Open-Xchange, which uses an innovative AJAX web interface to deliver new features and improved usability. Hostpoint will also offer additional Open-Xchange modules enabling users to seamlessly upgrade to a full-featured collaboration solution.

Following the partnership with 1&1 Internet Inc., the world's largest hosting provider, this partnership further validates Open-Xchange's strategy to serve the small-to-medium enterprise (SME) market: Open-Xchange is committed to supply the SME market with world class email and collaboration solutions through Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and web-hosting companies like Hostpoint. This partnership is therefore intended to push Hostpoint into the fast-growing 'Software as a Service' (SaaS) market.

"Webhosters, Internet Service Providers and Telecoms are perfectly positioned to meet the growing demand for new applications (SaaS) from millions of SMEs by leveraging their current customer relationships and infrastructures and by offering improved webmail and new groupware capabilities over the simple webmail in place today", said Gerald Labie, CEO of Open-Xchange. "By making Open-Xchange Smart Collaboration easily available with our partners, we are helping to transform the way people communicate that simplifies their everyday work, life, and social interaction."

SMEs step up from Email to Groupware

As part of the agreement, Hostpoint will deploy Open-Xchange's advanced AJAX-based email webclient to their 250,000 email accounts as part of their standard offerings. This will provide users with a highly advanced and feature-rich product with unprecedented ease of use. Furthermore, users can easily upgrade to a full-featured personal information management ("PIM") as well as a groupware solution. Hostpoint primarily addresses small to medium size enterprises (SMEs) that are currently using outdated groupware solutions or have none at all. Using Open-Xchange Hosting Edition, Hostpoint customers will benefit from a full service solution including storage, maintenance, backup, anti-virus and anti-spam.

"SaaS is a new and disruptive way for SMEs to benefit from innovative software "said Claudius Rollin, Chief Customer Officer of Hostpoint. "With hosted Open-Xchange, SMEs can make use of groupware technology without an initial investment or ongoing administration efforts at unrivalled price points -- which is in fact less than the cost of the electric power to run an in-house email server."

Designed for ISP's and Webhosters

The Open-Xchange Hosting Edition is the only groupware solution designed specifically to meet the needs of hosting providers. It has been architected to integrate into a hosting provider's existing infrastructure such as authentication, provisioning, billing, and email storage rather than require that these systems be replaced. Open-Xchange Hosting Edition is built on enterprise proven open source technologies such as Apache, and MySQL, and is able to scale up to millions of users.

Open-Xchange Hosting Edition offers multi-tenant and multi-domain capabilities, enabling webhosters to serve hundreds of thousand clients in a virtual server environment. This ensures a maximum level of service and customer satisfaction, while making best use of existing hardware resources. Open-Xchange Hosting Edition offers the necessary services and interfaces to integrate into automated administration, deployment and monitoring tools, ensuring 24/7 uptime 365 days a year.

About Open-Xchange Server

Open-Xchange's award winning Smart Collaboration(TM) technology combines email, calendaring, contacts and task management with advanced groupware features such as Documail and Smart Document Sharing. Productivity is enhanced through unique teamwork features, like team view, single-password document sharing, and shared calendars, contacts, tasks and documents. In addition, the option of synchronizing with Microsoft Outlook is available as well.

Launched in August 2004, Open-Xchange's open source project is licensed under the GNU General Public License for the software program and the Creative Commons, Attribution, Noncommercial, ShareAlike for the digital content. Open- Xchange Server has been recently awarded LinuxWorld's Product Excellence Award, ServerWatch's Product Excellent Award, and InfoWeek's Server Product of the Year.

About Hostpoint

Hostpoint AG was founded in 2001. With more than 50,000 customers and 100,000 hosted domains, Hostpoint is the largest hosting provider in Switzerland. Hostpoint is headquartered in Rapperswil-Jona, St. Gallen, and runs its data centre at Interxion in Glattbrugg, Zurich. Hostpoint offers their services also in Austria, Germany and Spain.

About Open-Xchange Inc.

Open-Xchange Inc. is the innovator of scalable and integrated open source email and collaboration solutions for small and medium-sized enterprises, academic institutions and government authorities ("SME"). Its products are available directly from the company, through partners and Software-as-a- Service providers. Open-Xchange provides SME's with state-of-the-art email and collaboration solutions traditionally only accessible to large corporations. By empowering SME's, Open-Xchange helps them compete more effectively in the global economy. Open-Xchange Inc. is a privately held holding company headquartered in Tarrytown, NY, with research, development, and operations in Olpe and Nuremberg, Germany. For more information, please visit http://www.open-xchange.com/.

Contact: Tara Steplowski, Open-Xchange Inc. 914-332-5720

CONTACT: Tara Steplowski of Open-Xchange Inc., +1-914-332-5720

Web site: http://www.open-xchange.com/