Cloud computing firm Giacom ThinkCloud has lowered its hosted exchange prices to what is believed to be the lowest in the global industry.

Officials with Giacom said that the company laid down the gauntlet to its rivals by setting its Hosted Exchange service at $4.59 per mailbox a month. According to experts, this is the first time that any cloud computing business has offered such a service for below $4.66.

Industry experts opined that the move is the latest evidence of the growing competition between companies offering cloud-based services as they clamor for customers.

 “Cloud computing is starting to become almost too affordable to ignore for businesses,” said Nick Marshall, managing director of Giacom World Networks Ltd, in a statement.

Marshall said that most companies are aware of cloud computing but many have failed to see the obvious cost benefits because traditionally prices haven’t been that low.

“But all that is changing,” he said.  “In the past six months we’ve seen a surge in demand allowing us to apply economies of scale for our full-featured Hosted Exchange service.”

“We appear to have reached a tipping point for cloud computing – people’s fear of putting data into the cloud safely is diminishing as it becomes more mainstream. In fact experts believe most data will be stored in the cloud within just a few years,” Marshall added.

Hosted Exchange provides email, shared calendars and contacts, and push email technology to mobiles. Instead of using a physical server in their building, firms purchase exchange mailboxes from a cloud provider, allowing the business to scale up or down easily without worrying about capacity or in-house expertise.

But competition between providers is intensifying and Microsoft (News - Alert) is now offering its own services through the Office365 suite.

Company officials said that Giacom ThinkCloud team has evolved since setting up in 1999 when it started by offering Web hosting services.

It launched its successful MessageStream email filtering and archiving service in 2005 before developing its cloud-based Hosted Exchange platform in 2010.

According to company officials, it initially traded via resellers and had more than 400 companies selling its products under their own brands but has now successfully launched its own services. Although 90 percent of Giacom ThinkCloud’s clients are based in the UK, it also has clients across Europe, the USA and even recently the Seychelles.

One of its clients is Russia-based Troika Relocations, run by Irish businessman David Gilmartin.  The firm provides help to businesses and their staff relocating to Russia.

“It’s a good fit for our business because we need to access email on the move from various locations around the world,” said Gilmartin.

“Being Moscow based has no bearing on where we buy cloud-based services from – shared calendars, contacts, tasks and of course email works equally as well back in the UK as it does out here,” he said. “The key to moving to Hosted Exchange was to increase our email reliability – you can imagine how important email is to a relocation company like ours – and to be able to do this without any costly on-site expertise.”