– 1&1 to offer ground-breaking alternative to hosted MS Exchange

1&1 Internet, the world’s largest web host by known servers, today announced a strategic partnership with leading messaging and collaboration solutions provider Open-Xchange Inc. 1&1 will base its forthcoming range of hosted email and collaboration packages upon Open-Xchange Inc.’s award winning Smart Collaboration(tm) technology. The move is indicative of 1&1′s progression within the global ‘Software as a Service’ (SaaS) market. The company’s mass roll-out of Open-Xchange technology represents 1&1′s confidence in open-source alternatives, and its commitment to the open-source community.

1&1 will utilise the Open-Xchange platform for a range of 1&1 branded MailXchange email and collaboration packages to be launched worldwide. Available first in Germany as of today, and subsequently in US, France and UK, 1&1 MailXchange will within the first half of 2007 offer the full set of personal information management (“PIM”) functionality – email, calendaring, contacts and task management together with advanced groupware features such as Documail and Smart Document Sharing. The solutions will deliver valuable functionality for small businesses and individuals, enabling remote working and communication at very low price points. 1&1 MailXchange accounts will be available as a stand-alone package and as a bolt-on for existing hosting customers.

1&1′s use of an open-source platform will equip customers with the very latest features at a much lower price than comparable products. Open-Xchange provides high performance and reliability and offers 1&1 greater scalability than similar licensed solutions. The open-source nature of the solution facilitates seamless integration within 1&1′s back-end email systems. Moreover, Open-Xchange’s open standards and APIs (Application Programming Interface) enabled a seemless integration into 1&1′s business processes, such as user provisioning, systems management and billing processes.

Recent years have seen a significant increase in the popularity of open-source solutions for professional users. A high profile example is the City of Munich, Germany, which adopted open-source office solutions for its thousands of civil service workers. Products like 1&1 MailXchange have the ‘look and feel’ of similar mainstream licensed products and are easily adopted by all levels of user.

Andreas Gauger, Chairman of the Board, 1&1 Internet, said “Our partnership with Open-Xchange is an important and valuable milestone in our open-source journey. Open-source applications have always been of interest to us, but the Open-Xchange offering now shows that open-source has matured to the level where it offers an excellent mainstream email and collaboration product.”

For 1&1, the partnership comprises a further stride into the ‘Software as a Service’ (SaaS) market. Gauger added, “1&1 will continue to call upon open-source channels where it is clear that our customers could benefit from innovation and greatly reduced licensing costs”.

“This is an historic milestone for 1&1 as well as for Open-Xchange as hosted collaboration solutions will clearly be the pace makers for hosters on their way to application service providers”, said Frank Hoberg, CEO of Open-Xchange. “The benefits for small and medium sized customers are just too compelling. They benefit from easy to use, state of the art business software that really simplifies their businesses for unrivalled costs – without initial investment or ongoing administration efforts”.

1&1 has a long and distinguished past in contributing to open-source innovation. Since 1995, the company has invested in developing open-source technologies for web hosting. 1&1 was a supporting partner of the very successful NoSoftwarePatents campaign and continues to contribute to open-source projects that are driving the web solutions industry.

For more information on 1&1 Internet Inc. visit the website at www.1and1.com

About 1&1 Internet Inc.:
1&1 Internet Inc. is a subsidiary of United Internet, a profitable public company with 6,000 employees and a market cap of $4 billion. 1&1 was established in 1992 and hosts more than 7 million domain names, while more than 38,000 servers run on the company’s five state-of-the-art data centers. 1&1’s global community is over 6 million customer contracts strong. The company’s U.S. headquarters is located in Chesterbrook, PA. For more information, please contact the company at www.1and1.com or 1-877-461-2631.
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About Open-Xchange Inc.:
Open-Xchange Inc. is the innovator of scalable and integrated open source e-mail and collaboration solutions for enterprises, academic institutions, and government authorities. Open-Xchange enables web-hosting companys to provide an easy-to-use and feature-rich application delivered using Software as a Service (SaaS). Internet service providers (ISPs) and hosting providers, led by 1&1 Internet, deliver advanced email and collaboration features through Open-Xchange to millions of users. Open-Xchange Inc. is a privately held company headquartered in Tarrytown, NY, with research, development, and operations in Olpe and Nuremberg, Germany. For more information, please visit www.open-xchange.com.