Michael Gold

Enterprise level solutions from Sphera

With a solid background in the industry since 1996, Michael Gold CEO of Sphera, discusses what they are going to do with the series D funding they just raised. Add on top of that the announcement just a week earlier of QOS (Quality of Service), and you have a company that is on the move to make big changes at the telco and enterprise level in the hosting industry.

Background

Michael Gold's extensive executive level background started with Qwest as a Senior Vice President of Internet Products at Qwest. From there he served as the President and CEO of Vicorp. Michael holds a BS in Electrical Engineering from the University of Illinois, Champaign/Urbana and an MBA from Stanford.

Q & A

Will there be any changes with the new series of funding?
Yes, we will use the funds to expand our sales, marketing, and research and development efforts. We are focused on the high-volume hosting provider, who need greater automation and the ability to deliver more meaningful SLAs, and know that we are best suited to gain market share in the telco and enterprise sector. We have developed a formidable product and it's just a matter of focusing more on sales and marketing.

Who were some of the investors?
JVP, Vision Capital, Gemini, TLcom and Banc of America Capital Partners and a few other names can be found on our website under the recent press release.

What are some other reasons you raised the capital?
When focusing more on the telco and enterprise market, your customers want to make sure you are going to be around for a while. We already had cash, but having more capital adds that extra level of confidence that larger customers want. We also wanted to increase the level of investment in our product development efforts to insure success for this class of customer and to explore additional applications of our core technology. Additionally, the new investment allows continued development of our distribution strategies and our marketing initiatives.

What types of customers are going to be most interested in your product?
Our customers want to provide a feature-rich, flexible, automated and high-performance hosting infrastructure. Our customers need high availability solutions, and many have 20,000 or more websites across several countries, or they need redundant systems in place to support critical systems, such as ecommerce sites. Additionally, many of our customers wishto integrate our solution into their existing environments, such as billing systems, network management and storage and business continuity solutions. Our solution, with its open APIs and SDK, provides significant opportunities for these integration efforts.

How does QOS play a role in things to come?
QOS, Quality of Service, will significantly increase ROI for hosting companies that need site level control over resource partitioning. With preliminary tests showing that the ability to control resources, including memory and CPU, down to the site level will truly maximize server load efficiency;thus allowing for an overall more accurate division of services across multiple servers. Finally, this solution provides even greater density affording operators greater control over their administrative and overhead costs.

Summary

With Michael Gold at the helm and strong investors backing them, Sphera is ready to capture market share and move every step closer towards profitability. This is the company to watch as it expands its grip in the enterprise and telecom sector for the hosting industry and maybe beyond.

_____________________

Christopher Bergström of NetSyncro.com