In addition to the e-mail service, Macquarie is offering Workforce Mobility to support mobile devices such as PDAs, BlackBerry, mobile phones and notebooks.

Macquarie Hosting managing director, Aidan Tudehope, said growing demands placed on business e-mail including availability, reliability, security and corporate governance means that effectively managing an in-house mail server can be a very costly and time-consuming proposition.

"Hosted Exchange makes sense for businesses that are growing rapidly, have complex communication requirements or do not have the staff resources to manage a mail server in-house," Tudehope said. "As well as 24x7 support it also means increased flexibility and reduced costs."

Delivered out of Macquarie's accredited data center, the Intellicentre, the software as a service offering removes installation and hardware investment and upgrades.

Tudehope said user management is delegated so businesses have complete control over adding and removing users from their e-mail systems. The service leverages a fully redundant and clustered backup solution and a team of 24x7 support engineers as well as a dedicated system administrators to ensure high-availability and redundancy. "As an established telecommunications carrier with our own network pipes and as a mobile provider, our customers can be assured of getting e-mail that is always up-to-date on any PC, Web browser, Windows mobile phone or BlackBerry."