Intermedia Adds Hosted Microsoft Lync to its Cloud Portfolio

Hosted Microsoft messaging provider Intermedia has added Microsoft Lync unified communications to its cloud portfolio. Intermedia’s cloud-hosted Lync will be available a la carte, but the company is very much pushing it as part of one of its complete solution packages. Oh, and this new Lync service is available via Intermedia’s reseller partners, too.

An Intermedia spokesperson hyped Lync’s cloud-readiness, saying that “unlike Microsoft’s previous instant messaging platforms, Lync is cloud-based and enables users to host video chat, voice chat, transfer files and conduct meetings and shared whiteboard sessions right from their computer.”

As I noted above, Intermedia is certainly offering Microsoft Lync from the cloud as a standalone service. But it’s offering a price break (with final dollars-and-cents value determined by the complexity and size of your deployment) when customers get it as part of one of its so-called “Office as a Service” solutions — basically bundled Microsoft Exchange messaging, archiving and compliance tools, at different levels of need.

This Microsoft Lync offering is especially intriguing in light of the fact that Intermedia recently started syndicating cloud productivity suite Microsoft Office 365 to its customers, which contains Lync Online as its major UC component. It seems that Intermedia is continuing its strategy of offering enhanced customizability around its in-house offerings (including white-label branding for partners), while keeping the more rigid Office 365 available as an option for certain customers.