OX Cloud 3 Step program to make email your fastest growing business

Your biggest competitors are not other hosting companies, they are Microsoft and Google.

• If you resell a Microsoft or Google email, communication and collaboration solution, you are basically "handing over" your customers to them.
• As your customers use these products daily, the relationship between them and Microsoft or Google becomes significantly stronger than their relationship with you, even if you are billing them. This makes it very difficult for you to serve customers like this in the future.
• Microsoft and Google are well aware of the benefits to them of a stronger relationship with your customers, as it strengthens their negotiating position with you and allows them to move you to a low margin reseller model.
• The way they deliver their products means they can easily integrate new services that are currently part of your portfolio directly into their communication and productivity suites. They also have the benefit of tighter integration into their platforms, making for a more attractive product and consistent experience when compared to services you may provide that are not fully integrated.
• An example of this is when Microsoft recently added business chat and video conferencing into Office365 (Teams) using its platform power to make it very difficult for Slack and Zoom to sell to Office365 users.
• Google and Microsoft will always prefer to sell their products directly to your customers, displacing you from the relationship.
• Some customers do ask for Microsoft and Google products and it can make sense to sell them if there is a reasonable demand and you want to retain those customers. However, you should focus on providing on an alternative solution that lets you keep control of the customer relationship and drive loyalty to your brand and products.