Harold Miltsch

Tell me something about yourself and your position in the company. What were the milestones in your life?

I’m Harold Miltsch, vice president of marketing for Verio. I’m responsible for ensuring that the small, mid-market and large business communities know about Verio’s unmatched hosting products and managed services, which make us the business provider of choice. I’m also responsible for driving our customers to order online which has become one of my most exciting initiatives. I do all this with the support of three major marketing teams that include corporate communications, product marketing and web marketing.

I consider myself very lucky because my career has spanned over two decades and I’ve often been at exactly the right place at the right time. I started on the agency side and had the great experience of doing marketing work for Kodak with Bill Cosby as their spokesperson. Those were fun times and I’m still proud of those magical moments and the portfolio I began way back them. From the agency side, I moved to the corporate side to head-up the worldwide marketing efforts for Xerox and led much of the work that transformed Xerox into a digital provider. I then joined NEC to manage their marketing efforts in North America with a huge opportunity to build their brand presence. I became more immersed in technology and the internet while VP/CMO for EarthWeb, and then accepted my current position in 2002.

Please provide us a brief history of Verio? What is your company's core focus?

Verio has experienced rapid growth and change during its nine-year history. Incorporated in 1996, Verio underwent a successful initial public offering in 1998, setting the stage for a series of acquisitions of rapidly growing hosting companies including iServer, Hiway, digitalNATION and others. Then, having emerged as the largest domain-based Web hosting provider in the world with customers in more than 140 countries, Verio was acquired by NTT Communications in September 2000, thereby creating one of the world's leading providers of IP services. The combined entities market their global suite of IP services in the US, Europe and Asia.

Today, Verio has implemented a number of strategies and restructured its business to better suit the changed Web hosting environment. The focus has shifted from products and technology to placing more attention on helping customers identify their business problems and develop a winning solution to help them grow their businesses, as well as achieve other business- and technology-related goals.

How do you improve the customer support and what is the major step you have recently taken in this regard?

Verio has made customer service a priority in our business, setting high standards of management, training and commitment to excellence in the delivery and ongoing support of Verio services and solutions to our customers. Our expert team works consistently to maintain high levels of customer satisfaction through increased responsiveness and attentiveness to customers.

Why should a site owner choose Verio over another hosting company?

As a member of the NTT Communications family, Verio enjoys a strong industry position with financial strength to support future growth and lend stability in today's challenging economy. The Verio service portfolio also possesses a comprehensive global reach-including a gateway to the Asia Pacific-enabling NTT Communications and Verio to deliver the highest quality customer experience around the globe. The company operates in nearly two dozen key U.S. markets, the top European markets, including the UK, Germany, France, the Netherlands and Spain, and all major Asian locations. With its global, 24-hour operations structure, Verio is poised to connect customers to its full range of products, regardless of where they do business.

Additionally, one of the next big industry shifts will see small businesses begin to reap the benefits of complex managed services that larger enterprises have been enjoying for years. The industry is now beginning to provide the managed services that small businesses are in desperate need of – such as managed storage and security services – on a much smaller, much more affordable scale. Verio has had a strong focus on the SMB market for years with Virtual Private Servers, Managed Private Servers and our shared hosting offerings, and we will continue to enhance our product features to include the more complex services that SMBs need as well as products to the enterprise market.

Tell us more about Verio’s Remote Backup and Virtual Private Server Solutions.

Many businesses have recently experienced the benefits of this new take on disaster recovery and data backup. Our recently-launched remote backup managed storage has already proven itself as an ideal solution for many small to medium businesses, as well as larger enterprise customers with critical data stored at a main business, remote office or branch location. Remote Backup provides network-based remote data protection and recovery for servers and PCs located on the customer’s premises. In the event of a network failure, the fully-automated service provides an efficient information recovery process, reducing the time and expense required to back up servers and freeing valuable IT resources for businesses.

Verio’s Virtual Private Server Solutions (VPS) is a managed hosting environment that gives customers their own private and protected area of a machine. VPS revolutionized web hosting for small businesses, many of whom could not afford the creation and maintenance of a web site until VPS was introduced. With VPS, Verio has created a new industry enabling hundreds of thousands of small businesses to establish a web presence by sharing the expense of hardware, and without sacrificing performance or security. Verio’s VPS has recently experienced a number of enhancements. The new VPS control panel has an intuitive web interface that makes it easier to set up and administer the VPS and creates a comfortable environment for less-technical users to take advantage of the power of the server. E-commerce offerings enable users to more easily build and operate their sites, as well as make the online shopping process easier and more convenient for their customers. Additionally, Verio has recently launched the industry’s first VPS Dual Stack offering, offering IPv4 and v6 in a hosting environment. The dual stack solution is a unique combination of technology and performance for early adopters of IPv6, the next generation internet protocol. VPS Dual Stack provides a cost-effective environment for the testing and development of IPv6-enabled products and services, before transitioning an entire organization to the new protocol.

What do you offer to business resellers? Recently Verio announced the launch of new utilities. What are the benefits to your customers that make Verio unique in providing of reseller services?

Verio works to ensures that business resellers are able to meet the requirements of their customers to deliver managed services and hosting solutions that drive additional value to their customers and higher revenue opportunities for resellers. Verio simplifies offerings for resellers, which are accompanied by world-class technical support and expertise that organizations of all sizes demand. Verio believes that its partners’ success is a critical component of its own success and has developed industry-leading programs through its viaVerio channel (www.viaverio.com) that are tailored to the business models of the full spectrum of resellers.

In regards to the new utilities for Verio resellers, the newly-announced VPS control panel is designed to provide a higher level of customization to suit the needs of specific businesses. Resellers can tailor the functionality of the control panel to limit the amount of access customers have to specific functionality within a VPS, or make new functionality available. Resellers may also now authorize end users to handle the day-to-day management of their own sites, which lifts the burden off of resellers who typically field simple, yet time-consuming requests from their customers.

How do you see your company expanding its positioning in the present favorable global environment?

Through our relationship with NTT Communications, Verio has a strong push in all markets including Europe, Latin America and the APAC region. Our marketing efforts are aligned to this strategy. In fact over 30 percent of our web traffic is non-US based and an increasing amount of our marketing investments are channeled to penetrate global opportunities.

Verio is now part of NTT Communications. How will this relationship help your customers?

NTT Communications takes a long-term strategic and technical viewpoint to the marketplace, which benefits our customers with the investments and vision of NTT Com. Verio and NTT Com can also equally take advantage of a global platform for product and service delivery, a framework for integrated global delivery channels, and the best R&D efforts in the industry. In addition, customers can leverage NTT Com’s and Verio’s state of the art global infrastructure including data centers and the NTT Com Global IP Network.

For NTT Com, the acquisition of Verio was a vital step in the creation of a channel strategy to dominate the global hosting market. Verio’s channel strategy is its business strategy: Integrated channel programs enable Verio to serve any business customer, from SME to Fortune 2000; channel programs are highly tailored to the needs of the full spectrum of business partners, including mass market OEMs, resellers, ISVs, solution providers, system integrators, agents and other strategic partners; only Verio can offer channel partners a full breadth of programs and the broadest services portfolio exclusively-focused on the hosting/IP market.

What makes Verio different from the other web hosting companies?

Verio continues to transform and innovate as the company refocuses on the customer and building the right solutions to meet customer requirements. The company’s strengths in global hosting, managed services and higher value Internet access and network solutions for businesses support this spotlight on customer success. We’ve streamlined operations and gained greater efficiencies, with the result that today, Verio is a cohesive and dynamic organization that is focused on excellence in the delivery of superior services and products, as well as customer service.

It is these same strengths that led to Verio introducing a number of groundbreaking offerings, including the creation of a technology that would enable small businesses everywhere to establish a web presence, which at the time was affordable only for larger corporations. Virtual Private Server (VPS) was a revolutionary hosting environment when it was introduced to the market and is still considered a very valuable hosting solution for those that use it. VPS gives customers their own private and protected area of a server that operates as an independent machine, allowing customers to share the expense of hardware without sacrificing performance or security. With VPS, Verio has created a new industry enabling hundreds of thousands of small businesses to establish a web presence.

Verio was the first network provider in the United States to deliver large-scale connectivity in North America of Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6), the next generation communication platform for Internet data traffic. Verio continues to enhance its IPv6 offerings for early adopters of the technology and recently announced availability of industry’s first IPv4/IPv6 dual stack hosting offering. IP version 4/version 6 (v4/v6) dual stack Virtual Private Server (VPS) and Managed Private Server (MPS) hosting solutions offer a unique combination of technology and performance and provides early adopters the opportunity to develop IPv6-enabled products and services in a cost-effective test environment before transitioning an entire infrastructure to the new Internet protocol.

Describe what Verio is doing to anticipate the next decade web hosting industry challenges?

Verio just announced the launch of its IPv4/v6 dual stack VPS and MPS hosting solutions in Tokyo, laying the foundation to meet the growing demand for V6 offerings on a global scale. The Government has mandated a transition to IPv6, which has already begun and has an expected completion date of 2008. Future planned enhancements to the IPv4/v6 dual stack VPS and MPS hosting solution include the ability to host multiple IP addresses through v6-enabled sites, allowing for more flexibility by facilitating collaboration between sites and servers, also allowing users to take advantage of either v4 or v6 networks.

Verio is on the cusp of rolling out a number of new offerings that will shake up the marketplace, displacing what are thought of as typical web hosting products and services and how they are delivered. This approach will enable businesses of all sizes, including small business customers, to take advantage of the power of managed service delivery in the future at a cost their business can afford.11. How many hosting customers do you currently serve?

Verio has approximately 300,000 shared, VPS and enterprise hosting, as well as Internet access customers.

What advice would you give to anyone starting his or her own webhosting company?

Agility and swift action is key in this changing market. You can’t be afraid of change in this industry!

What additional services or solutions does Verio deliver?

In addition to global hosting solutions, Verio offers a range of solutions designed to meet the unique challenges business face when designing and managing either a single Web site or a high-end, complex set of site operations.

We design our solutions completely around the needs of the customer, offering flexible, cost-effective and backed by world-class experts and customer support. Some of these services include:

·         Managed network security services, including Firewalls, Virtual Private Networks (VPNs), Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS) and real-time security intelligence and monitoring

·         Managed storage solutions

·         Monitoring & reporting services

·         Managed application services

·         Professional services, such as Site Promotion, Custom Web Solutions, and Web Content Delivery

·         Software Licensing Services

·         Dedicated Internet access

·         IPv6 Gateway Services

And finally, what was the most recent book you have read?

The Broker by John Grisham – I find his writing very enjoyable during airport delays. But I also alternate between action-packed fiction and non-fiction books such as Tim Russert’s Big Russ and Me. Next on the reading list is probably Jack Welch’s Winning, followed by my Father’s Day fiction gift, Velocity by Dean Koontz.