An amazing year has zipped by, and boom, it's Christmas, New Years, next year. The whole team and our partners have worked very hard to get an amazing amount of things done. To name a few...

- 1&1 has gone live with the new OX-based Webmail 2.0 for more than 6 million people, Versatel as well with more than 1.3 million accounts, the University Hospital of Cologne has gone live with 5000 users and and and...

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Cisco has announced WebEx Mail and 3947 or so other new products, but lets focus on Mail. Looking at the price list it seems that Microsoft with it's bold move last week pretty much defined the market:

• Webmail Client - includes webmail client, Ironport Security, High Availability, 5G Storage - $3.50/user/month
• Standard Client - includes Webmail client, Ironport, High Availability, 5G Storage plus Support for Outlook Client, Support for ActiveSync - $5.00/user/month.
• Blackberry support can be added to the Standard client package for an additional $1.00/user/month

InformationWeek and the VARGuy report on the heavy price cuts Microsoft just announced on their hosted "BPOS" offerings. MS Exchange drops from $10 to $5 per user, per month, the whole suite from $15 to $10, space goes up from 5 to 25 GB.

Now what does that mean to channel partners, service providers and all the other players in this market? Trouble.

To meet the "who is who" of our Service Provider and Channel Partners you had to be at the Rhein-Energie football stadium in Cologne on Oct. 8, 2009.  The day before 30 had registered for our technical workshop, 55 showed up so we split it into two. At the summit we and our 9 summit partners where very happy with the attendence, in total we had 120 people from all over the world. The venue was exciting, a whole stadium just for us (and yes, in a couple of years we intend to fill it up ;-).

Techcrunch puts a nice spin on the major SNAFU that the T-Mobile customers of Microsofts Sidekick product/service experienced this past week: "Letting Data Die A Natural Death" - natural selection of data from people unlucky enough to trust their data to the wrong people. If it is your data you do not want to be on the wrong side of natural selection - but how in the world would you know? This was Microsoft and T-Mobile! And they are not especially stupid - and it is me, saying this. No cheap jokes here, here they are too easy!

Reuters published an article titled "IBM takes on Google in business Web-mail market" - bold words but hey, this is Big Blue, right?

Yahoo is unloading Zimbra and with it the whole SMB hosting business. While the Zimbra part is interesting to us here at Open-Xchange, as it also shows some technology related weaknesses, the bigger picture may be even more interesting - especially to Service Providers.

Forrester Research conducted some more extensive research on what the cost of email really is with on-premises type setups. Even though they have chosen to look at 15.000 seats, the cost per seat and month still is between $20 and $40, depending on the usage pattern.

These news came to me as a shock. A 9.30am press conference of Google for news about Google Apps. I mean, great expectations, right? Apple yesterday, we were all live streaming WWDC for seeing the 3Gs for real.