Windows Phone 7.
Taking the world to school.

Why Mobile Hosted Exchange?

Gain New Revenue Opportunities

As a partner selling Microsoft Hosted Exchange® or Microsoft Exchange® Online, you can offer your customers and prospects a better mobility experience, and in turn position your organization as a trusted advisor that is relied upon for holistic communications needs. The transition from vendor to “trusted advisor” spanning more services can be a key strategy for your business growth. Windows® Phone 7 can help you increase revenue opportunities with mobility licenses, consulting services, managed services, custom application development and other customized mobility offerings designed to help your firm sell, up-sell and cross-sell more licensed services and solutions.

As an example, Cbeyond, a small business phone service and IT solutions company, experienced 250% growth in its hosted mobile Exchange customers over nine quarters, with 35% of its Hosted Exchange customer base adding a mobile component which resulted in lucrative additional monthly recurring charges. Notably, more than 75 percent of their customers who choose their full MAPI box also added smartphones. Click here for the complete case study.

Leverage Windows® Phone 7 Launch Buzz

There is no better time to gain market share of business mobile email customers or to improve the experience for your current mobile email customers by introducing them to Windows® Phone 7—designed from the ground up to meet all business and consumer expectations for connectivity, communications and creativity. Microsoft plans to generate significant market awareness with the upcoming launch of Windows® Phone 7 and wants to make it easy for you as an Exchange® partner to leverage this anticipated market buzz to benefit your Exchange® business.

In addition to this Microsoft Windows® Phone 7 Handbook, Microsoft will be providing partners with the following campaign materials and resources to support your efforts:

• Hosting Partner Pitch Deck
• Hosting Partner to Customer/Prospect Pitch Deck
• Bill of Materials:
  • Email with messaging
  • Fact Sheet
  • FAQ
  • Web Banners
  • Copy Block for Website Messaging
  • eLearning Tool: 8 ePacks and 1 Game
  • Telesales Script: Guide on using Windows® Phone 7 for upselling Hosted Exchange to existing POP customers
  • Telesales Coaching Guide

Note that the Windows® Phone 7 launch date is not yet disclosed at this time. Work with your Microsoft contact for further guidance on availability in your market.

Reduce Churn with POP to MAPI Conversion

The launch of Windows® Phone 7 provides an opportunity to talk with your POP customers about upgrading to a full Microsoft Exchange MAPI service. Research conducted by Edge Strategies with Microsoft in July 2010 suggests MAPI as a service is significantly stickier than POP. Below is a summary of the findings, and you can also view the full article:

• Web mail users switch their broadband provider 37% above average
• Hosted Business Class Email users switch their broadband provider 31% below average
• SMBs switch broadband providers 17% for additional services such as Business Email
• POP/Webmail Users are more likely to switch providers due to broadband cost
• Hosted Business Class Email Service users are less likely to switch providers due to price vs. POP/Web mail. They are more likely to switch based on Service Quality and higher Broadband speeds vs. POP/Webmail users.

Get on the Smartphones Growth Bandwagon

Mobile phone users are demanding more from their phones. They want phones to maximize their connectivity, communications and creativity. Likewise, the elements that are needed for phones to move beyond voice and text—like increases in memory and processing power, broad access over high-speed data networks and flat-rate mobile data plans—are now available, relatively inexpensive and, in many cases, standard. These increases in power and affordability have created a surge in consumer excitement and even greater demand for “smart” mobile phones. In fact, the number of smartphone device shipments continues to increase regardless of the economy.

Currently half the world’s population owns a mobile phone, with Converged Mobile Devices (CMDs) comprising 12% of all mobile phones. According to IDC, a total of 54.5 million smartphones were shipped in the fourth quarter of 2009, up 39% from the same quarter a year ago.[1] CMDs are the fastest-growing segment; by 2013, CMDs will comprise 20% of all mobile phones, or 300 million phones, equaling today’s entire personal computer (PC) market.

Moreover, according to Forrester Research, mobile users will make up 73 percent of the workforce in 2012.1 These users are not only traveling executives, but also workers who spend at least 20 percent of their workday away from their desk at a company site or in the home office, or workers who require mobility tools to move from meeting to meeting. Smartphones will surpass 226 million shipments worldwide in 2010, with 439 million projected global smartphone sales in 2014.2

Another notable trend, instead of using a phone supplied by their organization, workers now expect their employers to accommodate the smartphone they purchased for their personal use and integrate them into the organization’s network. Smartphones have applications and capabilities that users want. Thus, while corporate smartphone programs often focus on traveling information workers, IT managers should not underestimate the demand for mobility from a wider range of corporate users. Smartphone capabilities are a need that is obviously of prime importance to mobile or travelling workers, but workers who simply move from meeting to meeting or want to check email from home want these broader business productivity capabilities, too.

It has long been recognized that mobile is critical to the long-term success of Microsoft. Microsoft has been investing in the mobile space for almost a decade, first with PDAs and then with smartphones. Mobile is core to the overall company strategy, and Microsoft is committed to investing in and delivering the best mobile experiences for consumer and business customers. More than a new user interface, with Windows® Phone 7, Microsoft has evolved its entire offering to take full advantage of converging technologies, emerging online services and the opportunity they provide to give people everything they want from their mobile phone.

Microsoft has spoken to many small business and enterprise customers regarding mobile phones in the workplace. The most important need IT professionals and business decision-makers request is a phone that is compelling for end-users. End-users’ expectations have changed and have grown to embrace mobile devices as more than just a productivity tool. They expect smartphones to connect them to their friends, the services they use every day and a world of entertainment—all in a simple, intuitive way.

Windows® Phone 7 addresses this shift in expectations from smartphone users. It is the next-generation smartphone with a smart design that brings together what users care about most for business and personal use: staying connected with people, productivity and collaboration tools, photos, music and games, and applications to complete a deeply personal experience.

Be a Part of Mobile Email Boom

Employees in small businesses (up to 1,000 employees) spend an average of 33% of their day using email, and employees in large businesses (over 1,000 employees) spend an average of 40% of their day using email. Take it a step further and almost half of all users in organizations need email to do their job.

Specifically, mobile email is growing in small-to-mid-sized businesses (SMBs). 58% of SMBs want packages with hosted email and phones. In fact, remote access to email on mobile devices is the top reason customers choose Hosted Exchange®.

As POP is quickly becoming outdated, Windows® Phone 7 uses MAPI as a standard in email delivery for helping mobile-phone users get everything they need when on the go, just as if they are working in Outlook® on their PC.

MAPI also supports calendar features such as calendar sharing, calendar attachments, optional attendees, multiple calendars and accepting new meeting-time proposals. Regardless of whether the customer runs Exchange® on-premises or online, Outlook® will interoperate with Exchange® as intended. A customer need not compromise on core features based on where their email is hosted.

In fact, organizations have found that by adopting unified communications such as Mobile Exchange®, productivity and efficiency increased across the entire organization:

• 55% increase in employee responsiveness to others
• 52% increase in employee ability to gain knowledge or data from others
• 60% increase in flexibility of the workforce

These statistics show that employees can respond faster to everyone, and businesses supporting the employees can extend the value of their Exchange® Server investments without worrying about security and privacy. Organizations can provide secure integrated messaging, email, voicemail, PBX, IP services, presences and collaboration tied seamlessly to their mobile devices. As a result, businesses can remove communication bottlenecks and reduce the number of communication errors while improving business efficiency.

Utilize Mobile Operator as Strategic Channel

For those selling partner-hosted Microsoft Exchange® Server and interested in selling the mobility component, it is important to recognize the Mobile Operator perspective. Remember, Mobile Operators have direct relationships with millions of customers. A partner relationship with a Mobile Operator can be mutually beneficial to you, the hoster, and the operator. Given the right framework, a referral program with a Mobile Operator may not only benefit your hosted Exchange® business, but can also greatly improve the lives of your end-user customers.

We have built referral programs to make this partnership simple and easy for you and your customers. The guiding principles are to keep the referral simple, bring value to you as a partner of Microsoft Exchange® and bring value to your customer who will be purchasing a Windows® Phone 7. Referral programs are different in availability and content by market, so work with your Microsoft representative to better understand how a mobile phone referral program might work in your market.

Summary

• Windows® Phone 7 is a strategic conversation starter
• Windows® Phone 7 is an essential tool to capture more hosted Exchange® business and add-on revenue opportunities
• The market trends favor adding mobility to the hosted email equation – phones are powerful enough, demand is skyrocketing, and MAPI email reduces customer churn
• Windows® Phone 7 offers an opportunity for strategic partnerships with Mobile Operators