I visited Pulsen, a Swedish company, two weeks ago in a joint effort to roll-out their online backup service based on BackupAgent. Pulsen, amongst many hosters, ISP’s and Telco’s, use the Microsoft Hosted Messaging and Collaboration (HMC) platform to offer service such as Hosted Exchange. HMC also offers an open provisioning platform which allows services like BackupAgent to be offered to customers in a similar fashion as the customer consumes Hosted Exchange.

BackupAgent offers a very short time-to-market for hosters that already invested in an HMC platform, since we reuse the complete infrastructure which they already built and invested in. Because of this, hosters can shorten their return-on-investment regarding HMC because they can offer an additional service using the existing platform.

Interesting effect of platforms like HMC is that it changes the perspective for hosters regarding the launch of new services. Core competences and requirements regarding provisioning and monitoring are already in place, which lowers risks, implementation times and technical effort to enable a new service. As long as an ISV like BackupAgent supports the platform, the hoster can focus most of its efforts on the commercial proposition and marketing.

Some BackupAgent partners I spoke fear the upcoming of Microsoft as a service provider. Personally, I think that only a limited part of the market can be served by Microsoft in this respect. The way I see it, they encourage the hosting community to differentiate, instead of entering competition based on price. Microsoft offers hosted services to enforce a shift in paradigm in the price-focused, volume-driven hosting companies. They challenge companies to gain new competences, both technically and commercially. Since I’ve seen how some hosters are struggling with this theme, I think it will lead to a more mature hosting community with products and services that have a higher added-value for the customer.