BlueTie provides free hosted collaboration to SMBs

Looking to broaden the appeal of its hosted e-mail and calendaring services, BlueTie on Monday began offering the collaboration services for free. The company also unveiled its new plan for generating revenue via partnerships with third-party business service providers.

BlueTie has several patents pending on its new revenue-driving method, according to David Koretz, the company's founder, president and chief executive officer. Users of its services will now have the option of booking flights with Orbitz and sending and receiving faxes through j2 Global Communications and completing those transactions, all without leaving the BlueTie applications.

Koretz dubs the integration of third-party services directly into his company's collaboration applications "featuretisements." BlueTie and its partners will share the revenue derived from users accessing the services which are designed to appeal to small to midsize businesses (SMBs). He stressed the optional nature of the featuretisements and that BlueTie customers are under no obligation to use them.

In a nonbusiness application, a user noting a family member's birthday in their BlueTie calendaring application could connect directly with an online florist, arrange to have flowers delivered and see the delivery confirmation, all from within the BlueTie service. Koretz also talked about enabling SMBs to place orders with office equipment suppliers from within BlueTie including the generating of purchase requests. In all, he'd like to offer 15 to 20 featuretisements, potentially including Web conferencing and small business credit cards.

"Hosted e-mail services firms have been searching for ways to turn e-mail from a cost center into a profit center," Mark Levitt, vice president of collaborative computing at IDC, wrote in an e-mail interview. So far, consumer portals Yahoo and Google have relied primarily on advertising revenue. But as competition for those advertising dollars grows, the IDC analyst expects "innovative ways" to monetize e-mail like BlueTie's approach will attract attention from other players in the market.

Koretz sees BlueTie's primary competitor as Microsoft's on-premise Outlook and Exchange software, with his company firmly focused on the needs of SMBs. In fact, BlueTie serves two segments, he said -- the very small business segment which typically employs between one to 10 people and behaves much like consumers in its IT purchasing habits and the larger SMBs with 11 to 250 employees who tend to be more technologically sophisticated.

BlueTie expects to have more than 1 million users of its services later this year, according to Koretz. Already, the company handles 1 billion-plus e-mail message per month across multiple data centers. The featuretisements focus will be a U.S. initiative initially given that BlueTie's sales outside the U.S., accounting for around 40 percent of the company's total revenue, are driven by Internet service providers (ISPs), he said.