Bristow Group Signs On, as Leading U.S. Provider of Hosted Microsoft Exchange extends Presence to Europe

Tuesday, February 28, 2006 – New York, NY – Mi8 Corporation, the leading provider of Microsoft Exchange hosting and management services in the U.S., today announced the expansion of its hosting infrastructure to include a fully deployed system in a U.K. data center. This new extension to Mi8′s infrastructure provides for faster performance and better response times for clients located in Europe. Services hosted at this location are available immediately.

Mi8 is the only Microsoft Exchange service provider in the world with a hosting infrastructure on two continents, providing an unmatched flexibility for companies with international users, and unmatched redundancy for companies searching for high availability and disaster recovery. Mi8 has had a sales and support office in Europe since 2000.

Mi8′s U.S.-based system is hosted from a data center in the New York City metropolitan area. The new U.K.- based Microsoft Exchange infrastructure is hosted in a data center from Telehouse Europe, Ltd. Telehouse provides state-of-the-art data center and Collocation facilities for the housing of telecommunications and IT infrastructure. Mi8 previously announced a partnership with Telehouse in 2004.

One of the first clients to sign a contract for hosting on this new infrastructure is Bristow Group, Inc., one of the world’s largest providers of helicopter services, with major offices in Houston, Texas and Surrey, U.K. Mike Meyer, VP Information Management at Bristow, said, “Mi8′s presence in Europe and the U.S. was a major factor in our decision to outsource our messaging infrastructure. With more than 1,500 mailboxes under our care, and users spread across Europe and the U.S., performance and customer service were key concerns. Mi8 easily addressed all of our concerns, and was the clear choice to meet our stringent requirements.”

“We have seen a rapid expansion of our business in Europe, especially with companies who have employees in both North America and Europe,” said Patrick Fetterman, president of Mi8. “Having a physical infrastructure in a European data center enables us to provide maximum performance for our users working in Europe.”

Microsoft Exchange Server is the world’s most popular messaging and collaboration system for businesses, providing advanced email, shared calendars, project management tools, and document sharing features. Mi8 operates one of the largest deployments of hosted Microsoft Exchange in the world, enhancing this service with wireless access via Pocket PC, Palm OS, and Blackberry devices, with compliance-driven archiving services, and much more. Mi8 backs its services with a Service Level Agreement that guarantees 99.9% reliability.

Microsoft Exchange hosting is rapidly gaining acceptance as the preferred delivery model for this enterprise messaging and collaboration system, among a wide variety of industries. This outsourcing decision is being driven by a range of issues, including:

The emergence of email as a mission-critical system for virtually all companies.
The increasing complexity of email and supporting systems (e.g., anti-virus and anti-spam, backup systems, etc.), requiring highly trained personnel to operate and maintain.
Rapidly accelerating growth in the use of wireless messaging.
The impact of regulatory requirements on IT departments, including SEC and NASD requirements for financial services, HIPAA requirements in healthcare, and Sarbanes-Oxley requirements for publicly traded companies.
About Mi8
Mi8 Corporation, the leading provider of Microsoft Exchange hosting and management services in the U.S., today announced the expansion of its family of services to include hosted Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services. The new service is available to existing Mi8 clients immediately.

Windows SharePoint Services provide an interactive Web portal for users to come together, quickly and efficiently share information, and collaborate on projects. Tightly integrated with Microsoft Office, this flexible Web technology enables teams to be more productive, working together across time zones to focus on projects and get work done.

Mi8 offers SharePoint as an easy-to-use service where team members can quickly create workspaces for meeting discussions, surveys, documents, task lists, and other collaboration needs that increase individual and departmental productivity. Mi8′s hosted environment is an inexpensive and easy-to-use solution for this high-end collaboration environment.

“SharePoint is an integral part of the Microsoft technology suite for messaging and collaboration,” said Patrick Fetterman, president of Mi8.”And now it’s an integral part of Mi8′s services.”