Until now, Microsoft's managed services offering for businesses has been confined to Live Meeting, its Web conferencing service acquired from Placeware Inc. in 2003, Thompson said. However, at the recent Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference in Minneapolis, Microsoft Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Steve Ballmer stated that Microsoft plans to make more investments in offering managed services to its customers.
FrontBridge's services are "platform-agnostic," and will remain that way even after the acquisition, said Steve Jillings, CEO of FrontBridge. While the bulk of FrontBridge's customers use Exchange, the company also has a substantial number of IBM Lotus Notes customers who will continue to be supported, he said.
"We have Notes customers, and we are intent on providing top-quality services for our Notes install base and for Notes customers who use our services in the future," Jillings said.
FrontBridge has a series of data centers across the U.S. and overseas in Paris, London and Frankfurt, Germany, where it manages and hosts its services, Jillings said.
FrontBridge offers the bulk of these services through partners such as AT&T Corp., VeriSign Inc. and Sprint Corp., which private-label the service to their customers. Microsoft will continue to support this partner-centric focus, a key reason acquisition by the vendor was so attractive, he said.
"We've been approached by many large organizations to acquire us, but for most the fit wasn't right because there was a conflict with our partners," Jillings said. "This was a perfect match."
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