Blog

By Rocco Donnino, EVP of corporate development, AppRiver

Office 365 is among the fastest-selling products in Microsoft history, and for good reasons. Office 365 brings together a lot of popular apps and makes them available as a subscription-based service. Plus, Microsoft has put its massive marketing machine into high gear in order to bring customers onto the new platform. But before you join the rush – or encourage your customers to – be sure you’re tasting the steak and not just listening to the sizzle.

That’s where AppRiver can offer some invaluable insight. We’ve been in the email security business for nearly 15 years and are a leading provider of both Office 365 and Secure Hosted Exchange. In fact, our rapid growth and sustained success in the Hosted Exchange business was an important reason why Microsoft selected us to be among the first companies to bring Office 365 to market. On a daily basis, we help resellers and customers decide which product is right for their needs by walking through the answers to five basic questions:

Hosted Exchange 2016 is provided by AppRiver in our worldwide datacenters. Our customers can choose to have their service housed in the US or Europe, depending on their needs. Microsoft doesn’t give you an option. In fact, many customers choose to have Microsoft only host their Office Apps and not their email an data because of privacy and compliance concerns.

AppRiver has been providing email security from the cloud for 14 years, protecting over 10 million mailboxes for 53,000 corporate customers. Security is an option from Microsoft that is available within certain 0365 products. For AppRiver, it’s part of every product we offer. Every AppRiver Hosted Exchange mailbox comes with our SecureTide email antivirus, anti-spam and security solution-protecting against Advanced Persistent Threats (APT), spam, and malware. AppRiver, like Microsoft, can encrypt a customer’s sensitive emails. The difference again is that our customers’ data is held in our AppRiver datacenters, not Microsoft’s.

AppRiver provides a financial guarantee that our services will always be up and running 99.999% of the time. Microsoft offers only 99.9% reliability. This may seem like we’re splitting hairs, but it’s an important issue for those for whom minutes and seconds are mission critical.

It seems you get a lot of applications for 0365, over and above email and security.

At AppRiver, we can help you decide exactly what you need and make sure you don’t pay for something you don’t. For some customers, the Office 365 apps are essential; for others, they are simply window dressing. That’s why AppRiver’s email and security professionals are available 24/7 to help customers discover what service is the right fit for their needs.

Our company culture is built around providing a positive customer experience from first contact to “post-op” support. Our approach is called Phenomenal Care™ and we consider it as a product in and of itself. But the most important measure of our success is the overall satisfaction of our customers, as evident by the 93% customer retention rate since our company began. When you buy Microsoft’s 0365 licenses through Microsoft, they come with self-help options and additional premium support options you can purchase. The good news is that whether you purchase Secure Hosted Exchange or Microsoft 0365 through AppRiver or our partners, you receive our Phenomenal Care™ service at no extra cost.

Office 365 is clearly a great option for many businesses, but in the software world, one size seldom fits all. That’s why AppRiver continues to offer and support Secure Hosted Exchange. Let our experienced professionals help you decide which service makes the most sense, not just the most sizzle.

{{cta('a5612d1e-ec9d-4ce6-a4b8-5b9763cc3ca8')}}