XO Communications Named Hosting Provider for Microsoft bCentral Strategy and .NET Vision

Business Wire, Oct 17, 2001

Business Editors/Hi-Tech Writers

RESTON, VA.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Oct. 17, 2001

XO Selected as the Private Label Hosting Provider for Existing and

Future Small Businesses for Microsoft bCentral, the leading Internet

Resource for Web-based Business Applications and Tools

XO Communications, Inc. (Nasdaq:XOXO) today announced a strategic relationship with Microsoft Corp. (Nasdaq:MSFT) through which XO was selected as Microsoft's private label hosting provider for its 1.6 million bCentral registered users.

The relationship also includes future plans to integrate key bCentral services into the popular XO flat-rate XOptions packages of local, long distance, Internet Access and Web Hosting services that are offered on one telecommunications bill.

Microsoft's bCentral is the leading Internet resource for web-based business tools and applications and offers an easy-to-use suite of services, based on the .NET Platform, specifically designed to help small companies better manage their everyday business processes.

The selection of XO to provide private label hosting services to bCentral users ensures that small business bCentral customers have the advantage of state-of-the-art hosting services with superior uptime and performance.

Using the XO hosting platform will enable Microsoft bCentral to offer a number of service enhancements to its customers, including nearly a two-fold increase in available disk space and data transfer limits and an increased number of email boxes. These enhancements enable small businesses to continually scale their website requirements as they grow their own businesses.

In addition, XO and Microsoft are working together to build a technology alliance in support of the Microsoft.NET services, including Passport for a common authentication scheme and Exchange to enable higher-end business messaging and collaboration services.

"Being named the key hosting provider for Microsoft bCentral is a tremendous validation of our leadership in the hosting marketplace, " said Nancy Gofus, Executive Vice President of Marketing and Customer Care at XO. "We've developed an extremely capable hosting platform and view this relationship as a confirmation of the success of our efforts. While we at XO take pride in being selected by Microsoft bCentral to provide these services, we are equally excited about the opportunity to integrate key bCentral services into our XOptions packages, to further simplify a customer's telecommunications buying decision by extending our cost-effective flat-rate communication bundles with additional business enhancing online subscription services."

"This new relationship is a win-win-win - for XO, for bCentral and most important, for small businesses," said Satya Nadella, vice president of bCentral at Microsoft Corp. "We have had a strong working relationship with XO for some time, and it made sense to broaden that relationship. XO has a solid track record of providing superior performance and scalability along with excellent customer service. We knew small-business bCentral customers would benefit from this relationship."

XO will integrate key bCentral services into the infrastructure of the XO shared hosting platform, providing these services to existing and future bCentral users. These integrated features will also be made available to all existing XO shared hosting customers.

In addition, the bCentral services will be offered as an integrated solution within future XOption service bundles, which are sold throughout the country by the 800 XO direct sales force and through XO in-direct sales agents.

Key bCentral services being integrated into the XO shared hosting platform include:

-- Traffic Builder - search engine registration and email newsletter campaigns

-- Commerce Manager - online catalog for selling on the Internet, full capabilities for managing and processing orders for inventory, and ability to publish catalogs to a variety of e-commerce marketplaces

-- Submit It - tool for submitting a customer's Web site URL to globally driven search engines

-- List Builder - an email marketing solution that includes capability for building and maintaining customer databases and mailing lists

-- Appointment Manager - enables the Web-based coordination of meetings and appointments for businesses involved in the service industry

The XO shared hosting platform being offered to Microsoft bCentral's customers is comprised of fault tolerant, load sharing server clusters that provide enhanced and reliable service by sharing user request loads across multiple servers. This sharing capability allows for top performance, even amid large network traffic spikes or individual hardware failures.

About Microsoft bCentral

Microsoft bCentral offers small-business owners the tools and resources they need to run their companies more efficiently.

With more than 1.6 million registered users, bCentral is the leading destination on the Internet to provide integrated software services and information to address critical small-business needs such as customer management, financial management and expanded e-commerce capabilities. bCentral is located on the Web at http://www.bcentral.com/.>