It’s been a slow and steady process, but hosted Exchange and cloud provider Intermedia (News - Alert) is gearing up to be a major player in the hosted PBX market. The company has been working to build its cache of channel partners, including a number of prominent managed service providers (MSPs), and the recent completion of its AccessLine acquisition will solidify its position in the hosted PBX (News - Alert) arena.
In a deal that has been in the works since January, Intermedia recently finalized the purchase of Telanetix, Inc. The company has been doing business as AccessLine, and is a provider of a number of cloud-based communications solutions including its hosted PBX service, which reaches more than 40,000 business customers. AccessLine focuses on the small to mid-sized enterprise market, making it a solid fit for Intermedia.
Intermedia is known for its Office in the Cloud suite, with hosted Exchange service as the highlight of its offerings up until now. The company manages more than 600,000 Exchange mailboxes and related services, making it one of the largest cloud hosting companies in the U.S. By adding hosted PBX features, the company will be able to offer a full array of secure, enterprise-grade hosted communications solutions to its entrenched client base.
The company’s hosted PBX services offer all the cost-saving benefits of unlimited VoIP telephone service as well as a variety of customizable features. These include an automated voice menu, hold music, caller ID and call transfer, forwarding and waiting. Additional benefits include conference bridging capabilities, find me/follow me service and online administration via the HostPilot control panel.
For its part, Intermedia has been on a wild ride over the past few months. One of the highlights was provisioning. "I felt a rush just seeing Rockstar's name among our 50,000 cloud customers," said Michael Gold, president of Intermedia. "When they provisioned Exchange seat number 600,000, I wanted to grab my skis and attempt to recreate one of their high-action videos. I'm excited that such a vibrant company can help us reach and celebrate this milestone -- to say nothing of the fact that Intermedia reliably delivers the support, security and mobility that vibrant and fast-moving companies like Rockstar need to succeed." Rockstar Inc., maker of the Rockstar Energy Drink, as its 600,000th Exchange mailbox
The move into the hosted PBX space will bring many more opportunities along with its share of challenges. Intermedia already faced some negative publicity with a major service disruption that cut off customers’ access to their e-mail, VoIP phone, conferencing services and Microsoft (News - Alert) Lync files. It’s one of the biggest fears enterprise customers have when entrusting their communications to the cloud, and although services were slowly brought back up, Intermedia suffered some reputation damage.
In response to the incident, the company vowed to complete a reason for outage (RFO) report to identify its root causes, as well as take recommendations from the report to make changes to improve their stability and resiliency. Intermedia also promised to improve the robustness and responsiveness of their customer notification tools and systems.
While these types of outages are pretty much a given with any cloud service, Intermedia will now have to work extra hard to assure its customers it has taken proactive measures. And it will have to perform consistently if it hopes to capture a measurable share of the hosted PBX market.
Edited by Rachel Ramsey