GULF BREEZE, FL, June 17, 2008 – AppRiver LLC, a leading provider of Microsoft Hosted Exchange email service, today announced it is ready to offer Apple iPhone 2.0 users the only network optimized for Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync enabled devices.

Apple unveiled a new, upgraded iPhone at the Worldwide Developers Conference that allows a whole new set of mobile business users to take advantage of Microsoft Exchange. iPhone 2.0 software directly communicates with Microsoft Exchange Server via Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync, giving Apple users push email, calendar and contact syncing on their mobile devices.

“We are pleased Apple is adding the iPhone to the growing number of mobile devices that connect with Exchange,” said Michael Murdoch, CEO of AppRiver. “Like Apple, AppRiver strives to provide groundbreaking innovation as demonstrated by being the first — and only — Hosted Exchange provider to integrate Akamai’s IP acceleration technology, delivering dramatic improvements in security, connectivity and performance to our Microsoft ActiveSync customers and especially to the iPhone 2.0 community.”

Understanding the need for high performing, always available applications, AppRiver teamed up with Akamai to make the Internet behave more consistently for business-quality application delivery. By implementing the Akamai platform within its service, AppRiver assures its users will always have quick and reliable access to Outlook, Outlook Web and Mobile Device applications, regardless of their location or what is happening on the Internet.

“Mobility, reliability and security are among the most important trends impacting messaging today,” said Michael Osterman, president of Osterman Research, a leading analyst firm in the messaging and collaboration space. “When Apple announced its plans to license Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync for the iPhone, it opened the door for enterprises to take advantage of Exchange’s rich communications platform. Couple that with AppRiver’s robust mobile messaging services, and businesses now have optimized security solutions at their fingertips. AppRiver leads the way by offering its customers such innovative, high performance features.”

About AppRiver

Founded in April 2002, AppRiver – based in Gulf Breeze, Florida – is a software-as-a-service (SaaS) provider offering secure messaging solutions to businesses of all sizes. In addition to spam and virus protection, the company provides a complete managed service for Microsoft Exchange. With more than 30,000 customers around the world – and an impressive 97 percent customer retention rate since its inception – AppRiver is one of the largest email security managed service providers worldwide. In 2008, Red Herring magazine selected AppRiver for the prestigious Red Herring 100, recognizing it as one of the 100 “Most Promising” companies driving the future of technology. The company was also named to CRN Magazine’s 2007 Emerging Tech Dynamos list. For more information, visit www.appriver.com.

Media Contacts:

AppRiver

Michael Hamstra, Director of Marketing

850/932-5338

mhamstra@appriver.com

BURLINGTON, Massachusetts – June 16, 2008 – groupSPARK, a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner and the leading provider of private label hosted software services including Microsoft Exchange Server 2007, Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 and Microsoft Dynamics CRM, today announced that it has been named by Microsoft as its 2008 Partner of the Year in the Advanced Infrastructure Solutions, Hosting Solutions category.

The Microsoft Partner of the Year Award recognizes partners in a number of categories who are industry leaders and have a proven track record of developing and delivering to their customers best-of-breed, comprehensive Microsoft-based solutions to help them achieve outstanding business success.

groupSPARK was chosen for this prestigious award from a pool of over 2,000 entrants worldwide. The selection as the top Hosting Solutions Partner was based on the company’s demonstration of both technical and business marketing innovation. Its integration of Microsoft technology such as Microsoft Exchange Server, Windows SharePoint Services and Dynamics CRM with proprietary, industry leading automation tools enables groupSPARK resellers to go to market more quickly and cost effectively with a full suite of private label hosted services under their own brands.

“We are pleased to see groupSPARK present reselling partners with increased opportunity to deliver richer applications and the power of choice,” said Robert Deshaies, Vice President, U.S. Partner Group, Microsoft Corp. “Partners of any size can now offer hosted Microsoft Exchange Server based on groupSPARK’s service in as little as 30 minutes to customers using their own brand, domain, and corporate look-and-feel.”

“We are exceptionally honored to be selected from among thousands of Microsoft partners to receive the 2008 Microsoft Partner of the Year award in the advanced infrastructure solutions, hosting solutions category,” said Ravi Agarwal, founder and Senior Executive Officer of groupSPARK, a mindSHIFT company. “We are delighted that Microsoft has publicly recognized our proven success as the leading provider of private label SaaS applications – worldwide.”

groupSPARK’s industry leading Private Label Application Delivery (PLAD) platform enables resellers to offer hosted Microsoft Exchange Server 2007, Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 and Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 completely under the resellers’ brand. This technology is the only one in the industry that allows for complete private label functionality, including every URL seen by the end customer. This unique private label capability enables them to go to market in a significantly shorter amount of time - 30 minutes - incurring significantly less deployment expenses and allowing them to increase customer retention and monthly recurring revenue. Couple that with outstanding customer service delivered via live 24 x 7 U.S.-based technical support and groupSPARK provides an unmatched hosted services solution to its reseller partners.

About groupSPARK

Located in Burlington, Massachusetts, groupSPARK, a mindSHIFT company, is the leading provider of SaaS services, such as Microsoft Exchange Server 2007, Windows SharePoint Services v3.0, and Dynamics CRM, completely private labeled and resold by partners as a part of their own product offerings, saving hundreds of thousands of dollars in development and support costs.

Its partners utilize groupSPARK’s turnkey private label platform to provide hosted services to their users in minutes. Partners address scalability and uptime concerns by leveraging groupSPARK’s 100% uptime SLA, live 24×7 U.S.-based support and proactive hardware and software monitoring capabilities. For additional information, visit www.groupSPARK.com.

###

Product or service names mentioned herein may be the trademarks of their respective owners.

Contact Information:

Lisa Masiello
groupSPARK
781-273-6248 x.652

lmasiello@groupspark.com

Private Label Hosted Exchange is a perfect way to resell hosted Exchange to your customers without the need of having to host a complex exchange infrastructure. Some providers offer Fully Managed Private label Exchange hosting, which allows you to offer Exchange service to your client’s .Your customers will never know that you & private label hosting providers are involved each other. You can buy Exchange hosting at low prices and sell it to your customers at a profit without the hassle of managing Exchange infrastructure.

Businesses from small scale to large scale are exploring ways to drive efficiencies and hosted exchange is becoming its preferred option. Radicati has predicted that Microsoft Exchange will continue to increase its market share of the global messaging software with 200 million users by 2009. So exchange hosting companies are equipping them to tap this opportunity by increasing revenues from existing & new clients.

Challenges for in-house hosting

It better & beneficial to build and maintain the infrastructure in-house OR use a private label service to deliver hosted products to your customers?

Whatever the challenges are, the hosted services delivered to the customers are mission critical business applications, e.g., E-mail and other collaboration tools. Therefore, it is vital to mitigate the downtime and make the services available to your customers reliably. To ensure this reliability, genuine hardware is primary requirement with appropriate software. Last but not the least, it should be configured, maintained and supported by experienced certified personnel.

Support is the key here, as hosting environment is required to be up-to-date with appropriate patches. Then respond to customer with proper information when they are concerned about their data safety.

How expensive is to have in-house Infrastructure?

To build your own in-house infrastructure, you will need a capital investment of approximately $100K, and with additional budget set-aside for operating costs, technology, refresh, other upgrades etc. Apart from this, there is a high cost involved to build and maintain a reliable in-house infrastructure which is usually done by experienced and certified personnel.

How easy is to setup Private Label Exchange Hosting?

Private label service is the answer. What that means is there are no up-front costs of hardware, software, ongoing upgrade, operational costs and last but not the least, service providers will manage the exchange hosting environment with appropriate security, backup and 24×7 support.

Your challenge is just to sell the exchange hosting service to your customers and extend first level support for initial problems users may face. These problems could be new mailbox creation, Accessing to your email etc. Complex problems and related calls from your clients are generally handled by second level support hosted by service providers. Most of the service providers are equipped with subject matter experts in its support team.

In order to sell hosted Exchange to customers with confidence, you need to know that the service is reliable and secure. Generally, this assurance can be obtained from service providers itself. Most of the well known private label services are using Class A datacenters with N+1 redundancy, which are designed to create the optimum environment for servers and other hardware. This comprises redundant power feeds, uninterruptible power supplies, backup generators, optimal cooling and the up-to-date security. On top of this, these providers can offer 99.9 % uptime with the help of state-of-the-art systems, which apparently eliminates single point of failures.

What about security?

Class A datacenters are generally secured in terms of accessing servers to only limited authorized & certified personnel. These kinds of facilities are also having tight security with latest technology access cards, video surveillance, sensors of different types (finger print, motion type etc) and security guards located at key spots in the site.

Brand Identity

Tier 1 Hosting Service Providers usually provide its platform for resellers that offer the company’s hosted services completely under their own corporate brand, URL, and with a unique user interface. This private label solution reinforces the resellers’ brand with their customers, deepens their market penetration and enables them to offer their customers’ enterprise-class hosted email and collaboration solutions at a price set solely by the VAR.

In Summary

Private Labeling Support offers service provider’s unique control panel which displays resellers branding with its own domain URL. Technical Support with guarantee up to 99.99% uptime. A Web Based Service which can do provisioning services such as Mailbox creation, Quota Management etc. Additional business opportunities to sell other applications such as CRM, Wireless Mobile, SharePoint etc.

Del.icio.us : Private_Label
Flickr : Private_Label
Zooomr : Private_Label
Technorati : Private_Label

Date: Tuesday, June 17, 2008
Time: 2:00 PM EDT/11:00 AM PDT

Register: http://w.on24.com/r.htm?e=111294&s=1&k=7C4...f=usan

Webcast Description:
Today’s competitive environment demands that a business be mobile. Deadlines are tighter. Expectations are higher. Customers are more demanding. An organization cannot afford to have employees tied to their desks, or be out of touch when out of the office. Osterman Research estimates that by mid-2009, nearly 28% of employers will be providing mobile messaging to their employees. This is due to the fact that mobility helps employees turn travel and out-of-office time into productive working time. Staying connected is a key to not only business success but to survival.

The decision to deploy wireless capability seems like a straightforward goal but as you begin to develop a mobility strategy, your team will quickly be confronted with many challenges such as: platform conflicts, security issues, difficult users and support nightmares. In short, welcome to the Wireless Wars!

Join our webcast to hear the latest reconnaissance of the wireless landscape including:

– Today’s Wireless Battleground: A comparison of the popular devices such as Blackberry® and iPhone™

– The Latest Intelligence: Trends that impact a business mobility strategy

– Battle Planning: The IT challenges and methodologies for deploying an effective mobile strategy

– The Neutral Zone: The features and benefits of the hosted Exchange model that minimize the risks, and maximize the performance of a mobile messaging system

Reporting live from the Wireless Wars frontline are Bob Melk, Publisher of CIO and Steve O’Brien, VP of Managed Messaging Services at USA.NET. As a thank-you for attending, all attendees will be entered in a drawing to win an Apple iPhone™ (to be awarded to the winner once the new iPhone with ActiveSync is generally available). You must be in attendance for a chance to win!

Register: http://w.on24.com/r.htm?e=111294&s=1&k=7C4...f=usan

USA.NET
You Run Your Business. We’ll Run Your Email.^©

GULF BREEZE, FL, June 2, 2008 – AppRiver, a leader in managed email security and messaging collaboration services, today announced that it has partnered with Florida Chamber of Commerce to help businesses in the state avoid the loss of critical email messages because of hurricanes or other natural disasters. This is the fourth consecutive year that AppRiver and the Chamber have teamed up to offer this service in conjunction with the arrival of hurricane season.

Since it first became available in 2005, the “Digital Disaster Preparedness” program has become an essential item on many companies’ disaster preparation checklist. “The Digital Disaster program allows businesses in harm’s way to quickly reroute their inbound messages to AppRiver servers where they will be securely held. Once the danger passes, or communications are restored, all held messages can be released and delivered to the corporate mail servers,” said Blake Gehres, Chief Technology Officer for the Florida Chamber of Commerce.

Registrations is very simple, it lakes less than 10 minutes, and once completed will enable AppRiver to monitor a company’s email server activity. If the receiving server is affected by a hurricane, AppRiver will begin queuing the business’ incoming email messages in one of its own securely located data centers until that company’s email servers are up and running again. Additionally, the company can also request for its email to be redirected elsewhere or made available online, so the business can remain functional during the storm and the post-storm recovery period.

According to CEO Michael Murdoch, AppRiver’s own experience during Hurricane Ivan was a key reason why the company developed the program.

“When a hurricane is headed your way, there are a lot of things business owners need to worry about” said Murdoch. “Our goal is to let them quickly and effectively protect their email – and still have time to take care of their families and employees.”

To access the free service, businesses need only visit the Florida Chamber web site (www.floridachamber.com) or the AppRiver web site (www.appriver.com) and click the button marked “Digital Disaster Preparedness.” Users will be guided through a simple process from that point or they can call AppRiver at 1-866-223-4645.

About AppRiver

Founded in April 2002, AppRiver – based in Gulf Breeze, Florida – is a software-as-a-service (SaaS) provider offering secure messaging solutions to businesses of all sizes. In addition to spam and virus protection, the company provides a complete managed service for Microsoft Exchange. With more than 30,000 customers around the world – and an impressive 97 percent customer retention rate since its inception – AppRiver is one of the largest email security managed service providers worldwide. In 2008, Red Herring magazine named AppRiver one of its top 100 companies to watch. The company was also named to CRN Magazine’s 2007 Emerging Tech Dynamos list. For more information, visit www.appriver.com.

Media Contacts:

AppRiver

Michael Hamstra, Director of Marketing

850/932-5338

mhamstra@appriver.com

Live@edu now offers institutions the option of giving their students and alumni an Exchange Labs inbox and students get Messaging & Collaboration experience which is what they will probably use after their graduation. This also gives the University/School IT administrators a better control over messaging security and simplified deployment. Students & Alumni are accessing this reliable and security enhanced email experience from Microsoft for absolute zero cost. This service is actually provided through Exchange Hosting service, directly from Microsoft Live@edu .

Great Application Students really needed

This is the application Students and Alumni really want in their day to day life as they can now use a co-branded email inbox as their primary account. Also, they can use Office Live Workspace to save, access, and share documents and files online, and encourage themselves to do collaboration. Some of the on-campus collaboration includes shared calendars with free/busy lookup between students, student directories with administrative control to provision distribution lists, and the ability to add faculty and staff that are using Exchange on-premise to student directories.

Close Integration with Students environment

Live@edu & Exchange Labs works seamlessly with the information systems your students already use and closely integrates with your infrastructure. Universities can provide students with hosted e-mail with quota up to 10 GB inboxes and 20 MB attachments size limit. Students can also access their e-mail, contacts and calendar from Outlook Web Access and Microsoft Office Outlook, as well as from Windows mobile devices, similar to what they may experience in the work force. IT administrators in Universities can now rejoice as they outsource the time and cost of spam-filtering, server uptime and ongoing maintenance to Microsoft’s enterprise-class infrastructure.

How secure & safe are this service?

Microsoft Live@edu keeps your students’ data private and helps keep them safer online. Live@edu with Exchange Labs also now allows message tracking to confirm urgent e-mail was delivered, and content filtering, which gives IT administrators the ability to block e-mail with objectionable content.

Create Institution identity

Schools can establish the deep relationship with students and alumni through an e-mail inbox with logo of the school, institution’s custom theme and a school-branded e-mail address that students can keep after they graduate (e.g. firoz@oxford.edu )

Other services to compliment Exchange Labs

Microsoft Live@edu, which also includes Windows Live Hotmail, Microsoft Office Live Workspace and Windows Live SkyDrive online storage, helps students increase their productivity and manage their studies, share information and photos, collaborate with other students and faculty on projects, and stay connected easily with friends and family on campus and after they graduate.

Who can use it?

Microsoft said institutions are signing up for Microsoft Live@edu around the world, from Japan to South Africa to Brazil to the United States. Microsoft is partnering with educators from around the world. Live@edu will only get better in the coming years as they get genuine inputs from Students and educators.

What’s happening?

Microsoft said representatives from schools around the world will visit the company campus June 23-24 for Live@edu World, a gathering for Live@edu customers and technology leaders to discuss how they are using the Web-based applications in the Live@edu suite to connect their students, faculty, staff and alumni for greater communication and collaboration.

Summary

In my opinion, Microsoft is giving too much to Universities to exceed all of their expectations at zero cost. Universities now have the tools to develop a collaborative community with its own identity and not having to worry about infrastructure.

Del.icio.us : Exchange Hosting, ExchangeLabs, Free Inbox, Live@edu
Flickr : Exchange Hosting, ExchangeLabs, Free Inbox, Live@edu
Zooomr : Exchange Hosting, ExchangeLabs, Free Inbox, Live@edu
Technorati : Exchange Hosting, ExchangeLabs, Free Inbox, Live@edu

I came across the news recently where Exchange hosting providers give lots of attention to WAN Optimization these days and I thought of giving my perspective here in this blog post.

Exchange Hoster’s Pain points with bandwidth

The Exchange Hosting industry is becoming popular day by day, with growing numbers of providers everywhere providing Messaging & collaboration services to customers around the world, these customers are mostly SMEs. Microsoft Exchange being the core component of this service, it has been evolving from old versions to provide better functionalities, features and user experiences. Now with Exchange 2007 server, users can do even better. However, what about the performance? Customers by and large work from different locations, such as on the road, in a meeting with their customers, while commuting, etc. And these users often complain about slowness in accessing email client (e.g. Outlook). In an Exchange hosting scenario, all your customers have Internet connections and high bandwidth ADSL or slow connections depend on the customer’s location and internet infrastructure readiness. So, even if the hosting providers increase the bandwidth and no of servers in its datacenter, the customers are still stuck with these basic performance issues - Latency, a nightmare word for every customer as well as hosting providers.

This application latency gets magnified over a period of time, and hosters start scratching their head to put off the fire from customers at different angles in the world. Well, things are changing as there are solutions in the market today from various companies that offer increases in application performance, reliable connections and even high availability. Recently I was reading some news in the press about Akamai that provide a solution which transforms internet into a business-quality application delivery infrastructure and the outcomes are performance, scalability, visibility and control to mission-critical applications such as email delivered over the Internet. Despite the customers being SMEs, they are spread across either regional or global organizations. So email availability is key to them due to working requirements in all time zones. Apart from this, the workforce nowadays is mobile and accessing email, contacts and calendars is really critical. As reiterated before, connections from users email client must be quick, consistent and reliable when they access this information.

What must be done to achieve this?

Following are a hosting provider’s big challenges to address these concerns from customers:

1. Consistency - To be able to deliver consistent performance to all customers in order to ensure high customer retention rates.
2. Email Resiliency - Hosting providers are solely relying on internet to provide email services to its customers. Hence build infrastructure in such a way that hosters mitigate its impact if the Internet conditions goes beyond its control.
3. Scalability - Keep increasing WAN bandwidth and no of servers may not solve the application slowness problem and latency. So the infrastructure should be equipped and be able to grow its business without complex technology and additional infrastructure overhead.

Who can help?

Certainly, WAN optimization is one of my answers to address the above concerns in general. For example, Hosters integrate their state of the art Exchange hosting infrastructure with Akamai’s proprietary transport and routing protocols to offer global sub-second response times, secure delivery and control of applications from a single, centralized data center to meet the needs of customers, partners and employees around the world. Using a similar platform like Akamai, Hosters can ensure that Internet disruptions such as circuit failures, which are beyond the hoster’s control, can be avoided in a dynamic fashion. This assures that users will always have quick and reliable access to their Outlook and Outlook Web and Mobile Device applications, regardless of their location or what is happening on the Internet. Implementing similar WAN optimization solution at hoster’s datacenter will help them achieve LAN-like network consistency, performance and reliability over the Internet.

Del.icio.us : Exchange Hosting gets better with WAN Optimization technologies
Flickr : Exchange Hosting gets better with WAN Optimization technologies
Zooomr : Exchange Hosting gets better with WAN Optimization technologies
Technorati : Exchange Hosting gets better with WAN Optimization technologies

GULF BREEZE, FL – AppRiver LLC (www.appriver.com), a leading provider of email messaging solutions, has been selected as one of the Red Herring 100, the most innovative private technology companies based in North America. The Red Herring editorial board selected AppRiver as one of 100 winners from a pool of more than 1,500 applicants. Nominees were closely evaluated on both quantitative and qualitative criteria such as financial performance, technology innovation, quality of management, execution of strategy, and integration into their ecosystem.

“We can see the exciting evolution of the technology sector reflected in the quality and variety of exceptional companies that we had to choose from in putting our list together,” said Joel Dreyfuss, editor-in-chief of Red Herring. “It was tough to choose just 100 winners from such a large list of excellent contenders, and we are very happy with the quality of the companies we selected as finalists.”

The 100 winning companies were announced today at the Red Herring North America event in San Jose, California, where the CEOs of the winning startups have been presenting their innovative ideas and technologies to an audience of leading entrepreneurs, financiers, and corporate strategists all week.

“We are pleased to be among the high-tech industry leaders and innovators represented by the Red Herring 100,” said Michael Murdoch, CEO and co-founder of AppRiver. “We got here by anticipating our customers’ needs and providing them with cost-effective on-demand solutions. That will remain our primary focus in the years ahead.”

About AppRiver

Founded in April 2002, AppRiver – based in Gulf Breeze, Florida – is a software-as-a-service (SaaS) provider offering secure messaging solutions to businesses of all sizes. In addition to spam and virus protection, the company provides a complete managed service for Microsoft Exchange. With more than 30,000 customers around the world – and an impressive 97% customer retention rate since its inception – AppRiver is one of the largest email security managed service providers worldwide. In 2006, Red Herring magazine named AppRiver one of 10 private security companies to watch, and more recently the company was named to CRN Magazine’s 2007 Emerging Tech Dynamos list. For more information, visit www.appriver.com.

AppRiver Contact:

Michael Hamstra
Director of Marketing
850-932-5338
mhamstra@appriver.com

About Red Herring

Red Herring is a global media company which unites the world’s best high technology innovators, venture investors and business decision makers in a variety of forums: a leading innovation magazine, an online daily technology news service, technology newsletters and major events for technology leaders around the globe. Red Herring provides an insider’s access to the global innovation economy, featuring unparalleled insights on the emerging technologies driving the economy. More information about Red Herring is available on the Internet at www.redherring.com.

Red Herring Contact:

Anam Alpenia
Red Herring, Inc.
650-428-2900
aalpenia@redherring.com

# # #

As expected, Microsoft is now entered into the hosted services market. Initially they had launched Exchange Hosted Services whereby enterprises can leverage Microsoft’s proven Anti-Spam and Anti Virus services. Recently, Microsoft announced its beta release of Exchange Online and SharePoint Online for small and mid-size businesses (SMBs), Fig 01.

Fig 01

Why such a solution from Microsoft?

Microsoft Exchange Server 2007, Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 and Unified Communications are difficult for small business to setup and manage the day to day operation. Also, when it comes to technology refresh/upgrade, it consumes substantial $$$$ from organization’s budget.

Industry recognizes this challenge and also, realized that this should be utilized as hosted services at its best. At the same time, maintain the quality messaging and collaboration applications.

Sounds like another hurting by Microsoft?

This is not new to Microsoft as these types of offerings have been in the market from third party vendors for sometime. But Can Microsoft outsell the competitor presently in the market? May be in the future. They do not come up with services for third party applications for example, Blackberry enterprise server (BES). This piece of application is critical for Enterprises to increase employees productivity. Blackberry continue to lead in no#1 position in Mobile Messaging Market. This is why the current offering from Microsoft may not fly for most businesses unless they extend third party integration like blackberry, which will be very unlikely.

How is this Microsoft business model compared to existing third party in the market?

All these Microsoft Online services will be sold exclusively through partners but without any partner branding. The lack of partner branding reduces the partner’s relationship with the end customer as the customer realizes that the partner is not adding any value and simply reselling a commodity service. Meaning, this is not private label exchange hosting model.

In Private Label Exchange Hosting model, third party offers their unique platforms (e.g., Private Label Application Delivery or PLAD platform is one of such platforms from 3rd party company) and its designed to help resellers in such a way that they can sell these back to resellers hosted services totally under their own brand, use their own website by customizing it with unique user interface.

What are the reseller’s benefits from 3rd Party?

The working model of “private label solution” allows the resellers to stamp their brand with their customers while offering enterprise class hosting services in the Messaging & Collaboration area. Also, helps them to broaden its market and strengthen customer relationship. Some third party offerings to resellers are beyond just email hosting, for example Hosted CRM, SharePoint and even it goes to hosted PBX.

However, one common benefit I found in both Microsoft online and Private Label solution are, resellers or partners can avoid the expensive tasks such as Setup the infrastructure, Monitoring, maintenance, upgrading the hardware and software.

BURLINGTON, MA – May 13, 2008 – groupSPARK, a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner and the leading provider of private label hosted software services including hosted Exchange Server 2007, hosted SharePoint Services v3.0, and hosted Dynamics CRM, announced today that groupSPARK senior executive officer, Ravi Agarwal, will be speaking at the ISPCon Spring 2008 conference and trade show.

ISPCon Spring 2008 will be held at the Donald E. Stephens (Rosemont) Convention Center in Chicago, Illinois from May 13-15, 2008. The event brings together 2500+ internet industry professionals including ISPs, webhosting providers, VoIP providers and numerous other internet industry professionals to discuss all facets of internet business including ways to increase revenue and develop new business opportunities.

Ravi Agarwal, groupSPARK senior executive officer, will speak to attendees on Thursday, May 15, 2008 on ways for ISPs and the service provider community to successfully compete in the expanding hosted services arena. His presentation titled SaaS vs. Software + Service: How You Can Survive Microsoft’s Entry into the Hosted Services Market, will speak to the trepidation now felt by resellers of hosted services worldwide regarding Microsoft’s decision to enter the market with their own hosted services offerings. Mr. Agarwal will address the explosive growth in the market and offer strategies resellers can employ to stand apart from the competition and provide value added products and services to their small and mid-size business customers.

“The hosting industry is growing dramatically as more and more SMBs discover that they can pay a small monthly fee and achieved the same level of productivity as large companies by using enterprise class messaging and collaboration tools in a hosted environment. As a result, resellers are looking to take advantage of this trend and offer these services to their customers. However, the recent press surrounding Microsoft’s entry into the hosted Software as a Service market is making many resellers reconsider their decision as they are unsure whether they will be able to compete,” said Ravi Agarwal, senior executive director, groupSPARK division of mindSHIFT Technologies, Inc. “This fear is completely unfounded. There are many ways resellers can differentiate themselves and continue to thrive in this rapidly growing market. There is enough room for everyone to be successful.”

One of the ways that groupSPARK continues to thrive in a competitive market is to offer a full breadth of private label hosted software services through their reseller channel to SMBs who would otherwise be unable to deploy the applications in-house due to their significant cost. Services include hosted Exchange Server 2007, hosted SharePoint Services 3.0, and hosted Dynamics CRM as well as 2-way wireless synchronization with BlackBerry Enterprise Server^®, Windows Mobile and Good Mobile Messaging. groupSPARK also offers all resellers live 24 x 7 technical support via phone, email and online chat which is staffed by experts based in the United States.

About groupSPARK

Located in Burlington, Massachusetts, groupSPARK, a mindSHIFT company, is a leading provider of SaaS services, such as Microsoft Exchange Server 2007, Windows SharePoint Services v3.0, and Dynamics CRM, which can be completely private labeled and resold by partners as a part of their own product offerings saving hundreds of thousands of dollars in development and support costs.

Its partners utilize groupSPARK’s turnkey private label platform to provide hosted services to their users in minutes. Partners are able to address scalability and uptime concerns by leveraging groupSPARK’s 100% uptime SLA, private label 24×7 U.S.-based support and proactive hardware and software monitoring capabilities. For additional information, visit www.groupSPARK.com.

###

The RIM and BlackBerry families of related marks, images and symbols are the exclusive properties of and trademarks or registered trademarks of Research In Motion Limited – used by permission. The names of actual companies and products mentioned herein may be the trademarks of their respective owners.