NUREMBERG, Germany, December 17, 2009 - Open-Xchange, the leading provider of business-class open source collaboration software, increased its number of users to more than 15 million people worldwide - an increase of 80 percent in 2009.
The results come from deals with software-as-a-service (SaaS) providers including Versatel (Germany's third-largest telecommunications provider with 1.3 million e-mail accounts), Dotster (among the world's largest domain name registrars servicing hundreds of thousands of customers worldwide), NameCheap (a leader in domain name registration and web hosting with 1 million domains), Nexen-Alterway Hosting (the French leader in open source web hosting) and NTS (a leading distributor in the Asian market). With the exception of NTS - the first distributor moving into the SaaS market in Asia - all the others have replaced their web mail with Open-Xchange and are selling additional groupware and mobility capabilities - providing additional benefits along with revenue opportunities for the SaaS providers.
"While we've made tremendous progress in sales and development in 2009, we expect to build on that momentum with a goal of reaching 26 million users in 2010," said Rafael Laguna, CEO of Open-Xchange. "There are very exciting deals in our sales pipeline and more social network features coming to our collaboration software. We're really seeing the pace accelerating as we look ahead to next year."
The company's software is also used on-premise by some 3,500 companies and organizations worldwide -- including the addition in 2009 of a large Japanese retail bank and the University Hospital Cologne (in Germany).
In 2009, the company introduced an innovative groupware concept called "Social OX," which can aggregate e-mail from Google, Yahoo and many others into a folder in Open-Xchange, plus automatically add and incorporate contact details from social networks such as Facebook, LinkedIn or Xing to the Open-Xchange address book.
With availability of the Open-Xchange OXtender for Business Mobility in 2009, users can receive push e-mail and synchronization of contacts, calendar and other information from their Open-Xchange account to their smartphones, including iphone ,BlackBerry, Nokia, Windows Mobile and others.
Other additions this year are OXtender for MacOS X, which enables end users to access and edit all information and documents stored on the Open-Xchange server with their familiar desktop Mac applications. Plus, availability was made this month of a free open source connector for Mozilla Thunderbird, the cross-platform e-mail and news client developed by the Mozilla Foundation.
Official Open-Xchange support for Dutch and Spanish languages was added to English, French and German and the Open Source community contributed many other language packs.
Open-Xchange also announced important partner agreements. In the near future, the collaboration software will be extended with Rack-Soft's leading Unified Communications software to give end users telephone, fax, instant messaging integrated with Open-Xchange e-mail, contacts, calendar and task information.
Also, SugarCRM, the world's leading provider of commercial open source customer relationship management (CRM) software, announced cooperation with Open-Xchange to integrate data from SugarCRM and the Open-Xchange collaboration software as the first software to build on the social networking capabilities in Open-Xchange.
About Open-Xchange
Open-Xchange is the innovator of scalable and integrated open source e-mail and collaboration solutions for enterprises, academic institutions, and government authorities. The company provides on-premise versions called Open-Xchange Server Edition and Open-Xchange Appliance Edition, along with Open-Xchange Hosting Edition, which enables web hosting companies to provide an easy-to-use and feature-rich application delivered as Software as a Service (SaaS). The Open-Xchange Hosting Edition is architected to integrate into a hosting provider's existing infrastructure, such as authentication, provisioning, billing, and e-mail storage and does not require that these systems be replaced.
Open-Xchange AG is a privately-held company headquartered in Nuremberg, Germany with offices in Olpe, Germany and Tarrytown, N.Y. For more information, visit www.open-xchange.com.
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