Intermedia Fortifies Microsoft Business Via New Navisite Partnership

Intermedia is now providing Office 365 services to tens of thousands of new customers through a newly forged partnership with cloud service provider Navisite.

Intermedia, a longtime Microsoft partner, just amped up its relationship with the tech giant after gaining more than 70,000 new Office 365 customers.

Navisite‘s small-business customers that were receiving their Office 365 services from the managed cloud service provider are now receiving those services from Intermedia, a provider of business communications and cloud software, Michael Gold, Intermedia’s CEO, told CRN.

More than that, these small-business customers now have their pick of complementary cloud services from Intermedia‘s portfolio, including email security, archiving, file sharing, cloud-based unified communications, contact center, and videoconferencing, Gold said.

[Related: Intermedia Goes Global With NEC Deal Sparking Opportunities Worth Billions, Says CEO]

“We‘ve migrated about 70,000 Office 365 users to our platform and we’re working with many of them to also provide additional applications integrated with Office 365 to enhance it,” Gold said. ”It’s a win-win all around.”

Navisite customers that have been switched over to Intermedia have access to Intermedia’s HostPilot web-based control panel that gives IT administrators one place to provision and manage user accounts, services and devices, the company said. Businesses can also add new cloud communications services from Intermedia via HostPilot, Intermedia said.

Navisite, the cloud and MSP arm of Charter Communications, was acquired by cloud managed service provider RDX in 2019. Since then, Navisite has been focused more on database, application and infrastructure management.

“The Office 365 piece didn‘t really fit with where [Navisite] is building their business, so we struck a partnership where we would handle that piece for them,” Gold said.

Sunnyvale, Calif.-based Intermedia will continue to inherit new Office 365 customers from Navisite via the terms of the ongoing partnership, the two companies said.

“As we move our focus to other areas of public cloud, application and data management support, we wanted to make sure that we selected a partner who would deliver an uninterrupted and great experience for these Microsoft 365 customers,” said Mark Clayman, CEO of Navisite, in a statement.

Intermedia was founded as a Microsoft Exchange email hosting provider. The company’s longstanding relationship with Microsoft made scaling to accommodate tens of thousands of new Office 365 customers easy for the company, Gold said. “We’ve been tight with Microsoft—we have a significant number of Microsoft seats, so while this deal is multiple millions of dollars, it still marks a low- single-digit percentage of revenue of our business,” he said.

Intermedia has been making moves to boost its profile overseas this year. The company at the end of April inked a partnership with Japanese telecom equipment maker NEC Corp. that paired NEC‘s global reach and popular desk phone offerings with Intermedia’s cloud-based unified communications and contact center solutions. Gold told CRN at the time that the two companies are targeting 80 million to 120 million seats globally and that the deal was a “huge, game-changing opportunity” for the company.