MSPmentor

Rackspace Hosting says their hosted email services has  hit a major milestone with the signing of their 2 millionth paid business user. It’s a major sign of growth in hosted services. Here’s the scoop.

The last time we heard about Rackspace’s messaging business was back in June of 2010, when the company enhanced their Hybrid offering and claimed 1.7 million users — simple math reveals that they’ve signed 300,000 paying customers in about four months, which is a pretty good amount of momentum.

Rackspace credits their success to the breadth of their offering: they offer hosted Microsoft Exchange, their proprietary Rackspace Email platform, and the aforementioned Hybrid of the two, which enables administrators to put different users on either of the two platforms within the same domain, potentially saving a bundle on Exchange licenses.

MSPmentor isn’t terribly surprised by the news — Rackspace is a major hosted services provider, and if you build cheaper (but reliable) e-mail, they will come.

And this is more than a direct sales story. During the recent Rackspace Partner Leadership Summit in San Antonio, the company said channel bookings are growing at roughly 218 percent from one month to the next.

Rackspace’s momentum comes as many VARs and MSPs try to sort out their hosted Exchange strategies.

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