Open-Xchange Integrates with cPanel Control Panel

Hosting providers can easily deploy Open-Xchange business-class email and collaboration via cPanel.

Open-Xchange, a provider of open source collaboration software, today announced a partnership with cPanel, a hosting automation software provider, to enable web hosts and service providers to offer advanced email and teamwork capabilities to their hosting customers.

The company articulates that integration of Open-Xchange with cPanel makes deployment and billing of Open-Xchange simple for service providers and customers. Web hosters can offer Open-Xchange to their shared-hosting customers, as well as to users of Virtual Private Servers just by installing a software package together with cPanel. cPanel users can use their familiar cPanel interface to add, change and remove Open-Xchange users.

According to it, existing customers can easily switch from simple webmail user interfaces (Atmail, Horde, Roundcube, SquirrelMail) to the modern, AJAX-based Open-Xchange interface, giving them access to advanced email, calendar, contact and task management along with advanced groupware features such as information management, document sharing and social network integration.

The company states that Open-Xchange's unique Social OX features give users the ability to consolidate any kind of existing webmail accounts - for example from Google and Yahoo - into a folder in Open-Xchange so they can be managed more easily. Plus, contact details from social networks such as Facebook, LinkedIn and Xing can be added automatically to the Open-Xchange address book - giving users easy access to the latest contact information within their personal network. Also, users can merge their calendar and address books from Google into Open-Xchange.

"To make it simple for cPanel partners, we adopted the cPanel pricing model and charge partners per cPanel server," said Rafael Laguna, CEO of Open-Xchange. "This makes it extremely easy for hosting partners to calculate and resell Open-Xchange to their end customers and reduces time to market to almost zero."

"Open-Xchange gives service providers a competitive advantage with their customer base," said Aaron Phillips, Vice President of Operations, cPanel. "By leveraging Open-Xchange software, cPanel partners will strengthen their relationship with existing customers, increase their average revenue per user and attract new customers."

"Communication and collaboration tools are leading the way to cloud applications for consumers and SMEs (small- and medium-size enterprises). Providing customers with an expanded messaging experience, helps web hosts to grow their profitability and deepen customer relationships," said Antonio Piraino, Vice President and Research Director, at Tier1 Research.