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When it comes to hosted Exchange services, Intermedia is hard to beat. It’s already the leading service provider through which end users and solution providers receive their Microsoft Exchange services. So it wasn’t much of a shocker yesterday when Intermedia announced it had activated its 400,000^th email account.

The honor this milestone goes to Earth Networks, the online weather service that uses Intermedia for its email and collaboration services. And it’s the collaboration aspects of Intermedia’s growth that’s most interesting.

Impressive is the speed and drivers behind the run-up to this milestone. Intermedia grew its mailboxes from 300,000 to 400,000 in just 10 months. Two factors are driving growth: the desire among end users to rid themselves of the Exchange management burden, and the desire for more attached services.

Intermedia offers a portfolio of services ranging from hosted PBX to integrated Microsoft Lync communications for secure instant messaging to hosted SharePoint. The combination of services offerings is adding value to the contracted engagement and making services increasingly more attractive.

“Intermedia is continuing to align ourselves closely with our core customer – the small and medium-sized business – by bringing new products to market that they, and our partners, are eager for,” said Intermedia CEO Phil Koen, in a statement. “Our customers recognize that with us they receive more than a mailbox; they get an Office in the Cloud built with their needs in mind.”

The migration trend is also evident in where Intermedia gets its customers. More than 80 percent of new customers are transitioning from on-premise legacy email solutions, and nearly all new accounts are purchasing complementary services with Intermedia or through the company’s 10,000 channel partners.

What may be overlooked in the Intermedia milestone is that email is actually the catalyst for collaboration services. Email remains the mainstay of corporate and business communications. Rising quickly, though, are social tools that enables more expeditious connections, lower bandwidth and storage consumption and the potential to spark creativity. Some businesses are already moving toward curbing their reliance on email as a communications medium.

The lesson from Intermedia is that email migration to the cloud will lead to the sale of attached collaborative services, and those services will eventually become the replacement for email almost entirely.