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New York, NY (May 19, 2009) – Intermedia, the leading software-as-a-service (SaaS) provider specializing in messaging and collaboration solutions has unveiled Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 (OCS) for BlackBerry, an instant messaging and presence solution that allows business users to engage in secure instant message conversations from their BlackBerry smartphones to colleagues working at their desks. This solution goes beyond basic wireless email synchronization to better connect mobile and remote employees with their offices for increased collaboration and productivity. Intermedia’s offering is the first hosted version of OCS for the BlackBerry platform.

“Having instant messaging and presence through OCS 2007 on our BlackBerry devices makes it easier for our staff to be in constant contact and able to share information,” said Rachi Messing, Vice President of Technology Services for DiscoverReady LLC, an Integrated Discovery Management solutions provider and Intermedia customer. “Intermedia’s services have greatly improved communications and productivity for our company and this new offering is an excellent extension of that.”

This offering is an extension of Intermedia’s existing hosted OCS 2007 service, which Intermedia was also first to launch in February 2008. OCS 2007 is a business instant messaging platform that integrates with Microsoft Exchange and Outlook to provide secure communication and integrated presence. Presence capabilities allow users to immediately determine at-a-glance their colleague’s status – available, busy, away and offline – enabling them to quickly connect with available colleagues. The OCS for BlackBerry solutions extends these capabilities to mobile users when they are out of the office. Combined, the two solutions provide small business customers with enterprise-grade unified communications tools that greatly increase collaboration and productivity at a price they can afford.

A recent Osterman Research study on instant messaging shows that mobile IM grew 18% in 2008, the fastest growing segment of the IM market. Osterman identifies “traveling employees” and “senior technical managers” as the biggest users of mobile IM. 52% of the study’s participants responded that enabling users to use IM on mobile devices is either important or extremely important to them.

Business users already heavily rely on their BlackBerry smartphones for telephone and wireless email communications. The OCS for Blackberry solution adds secure instant messaging and presence, to fill in the missing gap, and provide true remote connectivity and productivity capabilities to mobile workers.

“Hosted OCS 2007 on the BlackBerry is another first to market achievement for Intermedia,” said Serguei Sofinski, CEO of Intermedia. “We continuously strive to help our small and medium business customers compete more effectively.”

Customer Demand Drives Continued Expansion Into Fourth Data Center

New York, NY (April 7, 2009) – Intermedia, the leading software-as -a-service (SaaS) provider specializing in messaging and collaboration solutions, today announced the addition of its fourth data center for its Exchange Hosting business.

This new data center enables Intermedia to meet the unprecedented demand to provide small-and medium-sized businesses with a hosted email solution that offers enterprise-grade performance and reliability. The additional data center capacity will also provide customers with the highest quality hosted messaging services and provide the infrastructure they need to work efficiently.

“The increase in awareness and acceptance of SaaS in our economy is driving SMB adoption of services like Intermedia’s hosted Exchange,” said Jonathan McCormick, COO of Intermedia. “We are focused on providing a premium service and continue to invest heavily in building and operating top quality enterprise-grade infrastructures to our customers. These new data centers, along with our three existing North American datacenters are world-class facilities that we built with hardware from Dell, EMC, Cisco and others to provide the best possible service to our customers.”

For its new data center, Intermedia has partnered with Switch and Data, a leading North American data center and Internet exchange service. The Switch and Data site has been built to the company’s high-performance data center standard and can supply more than 200 watts per square foot of power and cooling capacity. The data center provides Intermedia with full N+1 redundancy for its UPS, generator and cooling infrastructure, critical components of a highly available and reliable infrastructure, and enable Intermedia to offer a 99.999% SLA on its hosted Exchange services. Switch and Data has interconnected its data center to its other sites in the metro region’s premier carrier hotels, providing access to more than 300 networks and making it one of the most densely interconnected data centers in North America.

“Intermedia focuses on providing a high quality infrastructure to its customers, and we are pleased that they have selected one of our east cost data centers to host their newest environment,” said Ernie Sampera, chief marketing officer for Switch and Data. “As a leading data center services provider, Switch and Data provides Intermedia with a world class facility with N+1 power, cooling, security, and some of the best network connectivity on the East Coast.”

With the number of new business ventures growing during the current recession, Intermedia offers plans targeted specifically for entrepreneurs

New York, NY (March 24, 2009) – Intermedia, the leading software-as-a-service (SaaS) provider specializing in messaging and collaboration solutions, today announced a new set of Exchange Hosting plans designed specifically for entrepreneurial ventures. The plans combine a single Microsoft Exchange/Outlook mailbox with wireless synchronization for a BlackBerry™ smartphone, Apple iPhone or Windows Mobile device.

Within the current economic downturn, Intermedia has seen a growing number of experienced professionals leaving their former careers to leverage their skills in new consultancy practices or other entpreneurial ventures. After relying heavily on the collaborative and wireless functionality of Microsoft Exchange in previous jobs, these new entrepreneurs want the same for their new businesses. Intermedia’s new plans cater exclusively to this need and in turn help these new businesses thrive.

“For small and new businesses, email is often the first line of communication with customers and therefore highly critical to growth and success,” said Danny Essner, Director of Marketing for Intermedia. “The need for constant uptime and instant wireless access to email and data is punctuated for businesses starting up in a struggling economy and we are happy to lend to their success.”

“Having worked at multiple Fortune 500 companies, most recently as general counsel, I wanted, for my own new business, the same full collaboration and BlackBerry functionality that I was used to,” said Joseph Schohl, President of GeneralCounselWest, a California-based new business that provides legal and consulting services to General Counsels and other Senior Executives. “Intermedia’s one-mailbox plan was the perfect solution – I get all of the features I want without having to overspend for users I don’t yet have. It allows me to be highly responsive to my clients in a competitive environment.”

For only $20 per month, users will have access to one hosted Exchange mailbox with BlackBerry wireless synchronization. For iPhone and Windows Mobile users, plans cost $15 per month and come with one hosted Exchange mailbox with Exchange ActiveSync wireless synchronization. All plans are backed by Intermedia’s 99.999% uptime guarantee and include 24x7x365 support.

First Annual Intermedia Partner Conference Brings Together Intermedia and its Premium Partners to Share Roadmap and Vision for the Future of SaaS

New York, NY (March 11, 2009) – Intermedia, the leading software-as-a-service (SaaS) provider specializing in messaging and collaboration solutions held its inaugural Partner Conference last week at Microsoft’s Northeast regional headquarters in New York City. Sponsored by Microsoft, LiveOffice, RIM and Dell, the conference brought together 50 of Intermedia’s top strategic partners to discuss the future of SaaS and how Intermedia and its partners can work together to deliver SaaS 2.0 to the SMB (small and medium-size business) community.

Intermedia’s Partner Program enables IT solution and managed services providers to private label Intermedia’s hosted Microsoft Exchange and Dynamics CRM environments, along with its award-wining HostPilot control panel as their own to deliver turnkey services and solutions to their SMB customers. Intermedia has more than 3,000 active partners, 50 of which were invited to attend this event. The conference focused on the challenges partners face in migrating customer environments to SaaS-based environments as well as integrating SaaS with on-premise technologies.

“This was a highly successful event for Intermedia,” said Intermedia CEO, Serguei Sofinski. “We spent a full day listening to direct feedback from our partners on how SaaS plays into their managed services strategy and how they foresee Intermedia helping to bridge the chasm between on-premise and hosted technologies. Our product roadmap plays heavily into the tenets of what we’ve termed ‘SaaS 2.0’ and it was exciting to have our partners validate our vision.”

For Intermedia, SaaS 2.0 – the moniker for the next generation of SaaS solutions – focuses on integrating hosted software with businesses’ existing on-premise technologies to create a seamless, end-to-end IT solution. This allows businesses to deploy each solution in the way that works best for them, without creating silos or managerial complexity. One such technology, UserPilot, which allows solution providers to integrate their customers’ Active Directory with Intermedia’s Active Directory for centralized and simplified user and policy management, was featured at the conference.

“Intermedia’s Partner Conference was a great opportunity to share ideas and strategies for moving forward in the managed services and SaaS space,” said Jeff Cornejo of Blue Ridge InternetWorks, an Intermedia partner and managed services provider based out of central Virginia. “It provided a unique opportunity to speak with other IT service providers about real life examples of how their customers are seeing SaaS and how Intermedia’s vision fits into the real world.”

The conference also enabled interactions among Intermedia’s new partners with its key ecosystem partners, including Microsoft, LiveOffice, RIM and Dell.

“Sponsoring this event was more than worthwhile for Microsoft,” said Perry Cantor of Microsoft. “Software as a Service (SaaS) is an increasingly important delivery model for small businesses and the conference provided quite a bit of insight into it, how it is evolving and should be leveraged and deployed in the future.”

To learn more about Intermedia’s Partner Program, please visit www.Intermedia.net/Partners.

Famed ‘Five Nines’ of Uptime Brings Enterprise-Grade Exchange Hosting Performance to SMB Market; Supports the Most Demanding Application Environments

New York, NY (February 23, 2009) – (BUSINESS WIRE) – Intermedia, the leading software as a service (SaaS) provider specializing in messaging and collaboration solutions, today announced that it has raised its uptime guarantee from 99.99 percent to 99.999 percent on its hosted Exchange solutions. This new service level agreement (SLA) is among the most reliable solutions on the market today, and Intermedia is the only provider to offer this SLA on a shared Exchange platform.

“This new SLA reflects our ongoing goal to provide small- and medium-sized businesses with a hosted solution that offers enterprise-grade performance and reliability at a reasonable cost,” said Jonathan McCormick, Chief Operating Officer for Intermedia. “We are very proud to have achieved this high level of operational expertise and remain committed to improving our operations and focusing on business process improvements on an ongoing basis. Our goal is to provide our customers with the highest quality hosted messaging service on the market today, and to provide the infrastructure they need to work efficiently and stay focused on growing their businesses.”

“Our sales transactions are predominantly Internet-based, making email ‘uptime’ a mission critical component of our ability to operate efficiently and ultimately grow our business,” said Tom Halter, Director of Information technology for JC Whitney, the largest direct marketer of auto parts and accessories. “We have entrusted our e-mail and communications needs to Intermedia for the past year, and are especially pleased to upgrade our performance to the highest industry standard available today.”

New UserPilot tool makes user management and unified log-in simple with Active Directory synchronization

New York, NY (January 27, 2009) – Intermedia, the leading software as a service (SaaS) provider specializing in messaging and collaboration solutions, today announced the availability of UserPilot, a tool that allows users of Intermedia’s hosted applications to better integrate with their on-premise applications. With more and more companies leveraging a mix of hosted and in-house software applications, user administration has become increasingly time consuming and complex for IT administrators – a problem that UserPilot aims to solve. UserPilot also equips end-users with unified log-in capabilities, making it easier and less time-consuming for users to access multiple applications.

UserPilot allows Intermedia customers to leverage their existing on-premise Microsoft Active Directory infrastructure to simplify user management across on-premise and Intermedia-hosted applications including hosted Exchange, hosted SharePoint and hosted Office Communications Server 2007. Using UserPilot customers can securely synchronize user log-in credentials to enable a single username and password combination for individual users across on-premise and hosted applications. If a user changes or an administrator resets a password through Active Directory, the change will sync with Intermedia automatically so the user can log in to Intermedia services using the new password.

“Many companies are now finding that it makes the most business sense to leverage packaged software for some applications and hosted software for others. Unfortunately for IT administrators, this makes user management and application integration a far bigger challenge than in the past,” said Jonathan McCormick, Chief Operating Officer for Intermedia. “Intermedia recognizes this pain among IT administrators and believes that UserPilot will be a big first step into the integration of hosted and on-premise applications — which is where the future of software deployment is headed.”

“Intermedia gets it. We already using Active Directory to manage our users across all our applications,” said Derek Christensen, Director of Information Systems for Juice Harvest Corporation, an Intermedia customer. “It makes sense that we should be able to manage our Intermedia users from the same Active Directory portal, and UserPilot lets us do that.”

As SaaS becomes mission critical to businesses, richer integration and management services are necessary to eliminate inefficiencies in user management. With UserPilot, the maintenance of a SaaS-based email solution is effortless because hosted services are seamlessly integrated with existing on-premise software and user management applications.

Many other SaaS providers require that customers create and maintain user databases that are unique to their services but do not integrate with customers’ existing user management systems. This results in inefficiencies for IT staff as they must manage multiple directories and log-in credentials, and deal with limitations on data integration across the firewall between hosted SaaS services and on-premise software. Since UserPilot keeps on-premise login credentials synchronized across Intermedia-hosted applications, time-consuming password and new user updates are eliminated for Active Directory users.

UserPilot integrates seamlessly with Intermedia’s other hosted Microsoft Exchange offerings to allow for quick and easy installation. And because no business can afford to compromise the security of the information within their Active Directory, UserPilot was built with world-class SSL encryption and mutual authentication to provide total protection and provider validation for complete data integrity and security.

UserPilot is part of Intermedia’s larger vision of creating a software continuum from on-premise to hosted, breaking down the barriers separating software as a service from on-premise applications. After an extended beta period, UserPilot is now available to all of Intermedia’s direct customers and through its channel partners.

Companies interested in learning more about Intermedia’s hosted messaging and collaboration solutions should visit http://www.intermedia.net.

Fully customizable CRM solution extends company’s collaboration portfolio

New York, NY (January 20, 2009) – Intermedia, the leading software as a service (SaaS) provider specializing in messaging and collaboration solutions, has announced that it is now offering Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 as a hosted service through its private label channel partners. This offering extends Intermedia’s reach within the productivity and collaboration space, offering an easily deployable and customizable customer relationship management (CRM) solution to its existing hosted Exchange email and collaboration, SharePoint collaboration platform and Office Communications Server instant messaging and presence services.

Unlike other one-size-fits-all hosted CRM offerings, Intermedia’s hosted Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 is customizable to the specific needs of the individual end customer. This level of customization is possible because each CRM customer is guaranteed its own virtual dedicated server. Other vendors rely on shared server infrastructure and a basic control panel which limit their ability to meet every customer’s specific needs. With Intermedia’s new offering, customers gain a clear competitive edge because they are able to narrow sales leads, tactics, and sales and marketing campaigns to their unique core competencies and market demands. Intermedia’s channel partners gain an enhanced revenue stream from the opportunity to fine-tune and tailor the CRM solution to the needs of each customer.

“Intermedia’s hosted Dynamics CRM 4.0 enables us to add a high-margin recurring revenue stream offering into our product mix that tightly integrates into our existing hosted Exchange offerings,” said Joseph Kowalenko, President of a mid-sized Chicago-based managed services provider, and a Intermedia channel partner. “The flexibility of their service enables us to customize solutions for our customers, making us much more relevant to them than standard off-the-shelf software.”

“CRM has become a business critical application because optimizing and tracking the sales process has become more and more important to increasing sales and growing customer relationships,” said Serguei Sofinski, Intermedia’s CEO. “We’re excited to provide a solution that will help our partners meet the specific needs of individual businesses, in turn allowing them to increase revenue and form closer relationships with their customers.”

In addition to customization benefits, Intermedia’s Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 is tightly integrated with Microsoft Exchange and Outlook, allowing a minimal learning curve and quick return on investment. It can be fully synchronized with email, tasks, contacts and calendars. Users can also seamlessly export data into Excel for fast analysis and reporting.

Businesses around the globe looking for a trusted provider of and partner for hosted and private label SaaS, including Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0, Microsoft Exchange 2007, SharePoint, Office Communications Server 2007, visit Intermedia’s Web site at http://www.Intermedia.net.

New Offering Reinforces Intermedia’s First to Market Reputation

New York, NY (December 18, 2008) – Intermedia, the leading provider of email, collaboration and productivity SaaS solutions, today announced the availability of its Business Productivity Suite (BPS), the first hosted solution to include hosted Microsoft Exchange 2007, Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services 3.0, Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 (OCS) and Microsoft Outlook 2007 as a bundled offering. This new solution helps businesses increase productivity and efficiency while allowing greater flexibility and lower risk, all for a lower price point than on-premise software or a la carte hosted services.

“Hosted OCS from Intermedia has really helped us communicate and collaborate more efficiently,” said Diana Umarova of MGN Capital, a New York-based financial services consulting firm and an Intermedia client. “Its tight integration with hosted Exchange to provide real-time presence information within Outlook makes our hosted Exchange service far more powerful effective than Exchange on its own.”

The launch of BPS extends Intermedia’s long track record of firsts in the hosted messaging and collaboration space. Intermedia was the first provider of hosted Microsoft Exchange 2007, first to market with hosted OCS 2007, and now the first to market with a true hosted productivity suite. The company credits these achievements to its Intermedia-developed HostPilot® platform, a robust and flexible system that offers far more functionality than other locked-down platforms. This enables Intermedia to deploy new hosted services to its customers far faster than other hosting providers – or even Microsoft.

In addition to offering bundled Microsoft Exchange 2007, Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services 3.0, Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 (OCS) and Microsoft Outlook 2007 in the Intermedia BPS, Intermedia’s offering includes other notable industry-leading capabilities:

Inclusive copies of Microsoft Outlook 2007 & Entourage 2008 with its BPS plans
BlackBerry and iPhone Synchronization as with all Intermedia offerings
Award winning control panel as with all Intermedia offerings
Month to month contracts
High SLA, 99.999% uptime guarantee
Email compliance, archiving, encryption, delegated administration and other options offered solely through Intermedia
Intermedia’s BPS solution is available for $15 per user per month. More information is available at www.intermedia.net/bps

ContactSync to Sync G1 with Microsoft Exchange Server

New York, NY (October 20, 2008) – Intermedia, the leading provider of collaboration and productivity SaaS solutions, and Wrike, the leading provider of on-demand project management software for small and midsize companies, today jointly announce the immediate availability of ContactSync, a free wireless contacts synchronization tool for the new T-mobile G1 smartphone. Available to all Microsoft Exchange users—including those not currently Intermedia or Wrike customers—this application enables users to wirelessly sync their Exchange/Outlook contacts to their G1 smartphone address book.

While the new G1 smartphone, based on Google’s new Android mobile operating system, brings more choice to the touch-screen phone market, the phone lacks connectivity to mainstream business applications, including Microsoft Exchange, for wireless synchronization of email, calendars and contacts which everyday users are demanding. A recent Intermedia survey reveals that 92% of end-users access business email on their mobile devices thus exhibiting the overwhelming need for enterprise access on a mobile device.

ContactSync from Intermedia and Wrike eliminates a major user challenge by providing a direct, wireless connection between the G1 and a user’s Exchange contacts, enabling the user to easily download all of their contacts to their phone for free. The G1 itself is designed to sync only with Google apps, otherwise forcing users to use their personal Gmail accounts to access business data on the phone.

“As developers of email-integrated project management solutions, we understand the importance of maximizing the collaborative capabilities across as many devices as possible,” said Andrew Filev, CEO of Wrike.

“At Intermedia, we have a tradition of providing customers with as much choice as possible in the clients and mobile devices they use to access our hosted Exchange and other SaaS applications,” said Serguei Sofinski, CEO for Intermedia. “In the footsteps of our BlackBerry and iPhone offerings, we have partnered with Wrike to develop and distribute this critical communication application so that users of any Exchange server, including Intermedia’s hosted Exchange customers, can begin integrating the G1 phone into their business communications.”

ContactSync provides one-way only wireless download of Exchange contacts to the G1 phone’s address book. The application is immediately available for free download to all users of Microsoft Exchange and can be found on both the Intermedia and Wrike web sites respectively at www.wrike.com/g1-exchange-sync.html and http://www.intermedia.net/G1