NUREMBERG, Germany, August 6, 2009 - Open-Xchange, the leading provider of open source groupware, today announced the first Open-Xchange Partner Summit taking place October 8 at the RheinEnergie Stadion in Cologne, Germany. The Summit provides the partner community with a unique forum to learn how to advance their business with e-mail and collaboration services.

Through its partner community, Open-Xchange is successful selling open source collaboration services as both an on-premise solution and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) using exactly the same source code. Open-Xchange enables SaaS providers and on-premise channel partners to join forces and leverage their respective strengths, while system integrators and resellers can partner with service providers to offer hosted Open-Xchange to their customer base without any upfront investments to set up a complex and secure hosting infrastructure. SaaS providers can benefit from resellers' and system integrators' local and regional customer base and in-depth technical and consulting expertise.

"With its partners, Open-Xchange brings together the benefits of on-premise and SaaS, which results in a growing number of customers for both system integrators and service providers," said Rafael Laguna, CEO of Open-Xchange. "SaaS is a disruptive way for a growing number of enterprises to benefit from groupware technology without an initial investment or on-going administration efforts at unrivalled price points. At the same time, we've seen large enterprises realize lower cost by moving their on-premise installation from their proprietary client-server solution to a modular open source stack using a full-featured web client."

Highlights of the Summit include:

• Rafael Laguna, CEO of Open-Xchange, sharing ideas about how channel partners can benefit in this challenging economy from industry trends such as SaaS, mobility and open source by offering new services based on Open-Xchange.
• Frank Hoberg, Executive Vice President of Sales and Marketing, explaining how system integrators, hosting providers and independent software vendors (ISVs) can take advantage of Open-Xchange's on-premise and SaaS offerings in different market segments.
• Presentations by industry executives from Open-Xchange, Parallels, Univention and SEP providing perspectives on integration, security and mobility technologies.

The Open-Xchange Summit features separate tracks for system integrators, SaaS providers and ISVs. Keynotes and tracks provide in-depth technology and marketing strategy sessions for business and technical professionals interested in learning more about how to grow their business with Open-Xchange messaging and collaboration solutions. The Open-Xchange Partner Summit concludes with an evening networking event. For the detailed agenda and free registration, visit www.open-xchange.com/en/partnersummit.

Open-Xchange is installed by more than 3,500 companies and organizations worldwide with the Open-Xchange Hosting Edition used by more than 10 million users worldwide as hosted business-class e-mail, along with personal information management (PIM), and full groupware. Open-Xchange works together with top-tier technology partners like Parallels, Novell, Red Hat, and Univention, as well as to more than 500 system integrators and resellers worldwide.