What is driving growth at your company?

   Eric Pratt, Founder and CEO of Server Intellect

Server Intellect has a strong business focus on providing complete ‘ready-to-run’ server solutions coupled with exceptional 24/7/365 support. We feel we have done this extremely well, and so do our customers. Most all of our growth comes directly from our customers referring other customers. When you’re doing something so right, something other companies may not be doing as well, customers do take notice and they do tell others.

   Urvish Vashi, Director of Product Management, with The Planet

The pervasive nature of doing business online continues to drive our growth. More specifically, the fastest growing segments of our business are those that take advantage of the more complex hosting solutions such as our private racks. The existence of many of these online businesses is predicated on having a scalable hosting environment. As a result, the ability to instantly scale with complex hosting solutions such as advanced firewalls, load balancers, databases, application servers and SANs is the foundation for their business and growth prospects. We also hear time and time again that they choose The Planet because of the quality of our data centers and our network; we also can deliver on their technical infrastructure requirements and support needs with cost-effective pricing.

   Dan Richfield, CEO and President, EasyCGI

We strive to keep Easy CGI at the top of its game. This goes for keeping our services competitive with the competition, as well as our support at a level where customers are happy. Windows 2008 was released in February 2008, and due to our close ties with Microsoft, we were able to offer hosting services on this platform a full month prior to the official release date.

   Marc Burofsky, President, Barak Hosting

We are seeing a multitude of needs for our clients to move up to Dedicated Servers. Some from Shared but for the most part from VPS server environments as they grow their presence and required resources. Dedicated Servers “with” Management is the leading direction growing our business right now.

   Steve Renda, Vice President of Sales and Marketing, Verio

There are three main things that I see.

I’ll start with our professional services, which is one of our fastest growing segments at Verio. Our customers want to do more sophisticated things, and as such, their questions are becoming more and more sophisticated beyond their own capabilities. It’s one thing to host a web site, but it’s something entirely different to find a true partner to help you succeed in whatever business venture you’re involved in. We offer an expanding suite of services that augment our core offering to provide a complete solution for our customers.

Second is our launch of Verio Business Solutions, which we successfully launched late last year. This provides our customers with on-demand software offerings – be it email, security or data protection – for the first time in our history. This was admittedly a significant change from our traditional business model, but as expected, our customers have responded. We are seeing strong adoption down market. And, of course, HostReview.com editors named Verio its “2007 Best SaaS (Software as a Service) Provider” on the strength of this new offering, so we must be doing something right.

And last, but by no means least, is our core hosting services. Our customers are attracted to us because of our reputation for reliability and industry-leading customer service. It’s easy for anyone to promise this to customers, but it’s another thing to execute against it. This remains at the heart of our business.

What do you think is different now from the years of the dot-com bubble and bust?

   Eric Pratt, Founder and CEO of Server Intellect

I truly feel that today’s internet technology companies have learned many valuable lessons since the years of the .dot com bubble and bust. Venture Capitalist funds are still easily available, but it appears as though more firms are looking to build a strong foundation and solid business plan before taking on funding. ‘Fast and Furious’ is not a solid business plan.

   Urvish Vashi, Director of Product Management, with The Planet

During the dot-com bubble and bust, hosting businesses relied on a single market sector to drive growth, primarily e-commerce, e-tailers and technology companies. Today, a broad spectrum of companies are online, whether it’s to sell more products, manage their application infrastructure more effectively, or roll out a new application. The history of bubbles has almost always been tied to single-sector growth, whether it be the famous tulip bubble in the Netherlands in the 1600s or the dot-com bust of 2001. Having a broad range of customers in multiple sectors typically reflects a market shift in how business is done, and hosting is clearly a beneficiary of the online shift.

During the dot-com bubble, enormous amounts of capital were invested in businesses that didn’t have realistic business plans, and the Internet was not pervasive – online businesses weren’t yet accepted as the norm. While entrepreneurs and startups are an important part of our base, we find an increasing proportion of our growth comes from established SMBs and online companies, all of which makes the decision to go online to cut costs a smart choice.

   Dan Richfield, CEO and President, EasyCGI

The industry has matured and stabilized over the course of the last 8 years. In the years prior to 2000, every single company in the hosting industry was forced to develop on-the-fly solutions for virtually every aspect of their platform. Now that time has gone by, most players have a much better sense of best practices for the technologies they support. This makes for a far more stable environment, which customers have come to expect.

   Marc Burofsky, President, Barak Hosting

More stability and realistic decision making. That is an asset as we plan our future growth needs. Our clients are more realistically planning their needs, providing us the guidance and that results in more realistic planning to help limit our exposure to a bubble type environment. The sales side will naturally follow the guidance as well.

   Steve Renda, Vice President of Sales and Marketing, Verio

There’s really one important difference between what is happening now and during the dot-com era – the business models then were for the most part unproven. Back then, there was a lot of spaghetti being thrown at a lot of walls. As quickly as new technology was tried, customers were just as quick to throw it out. Today there’s little appetite for wild experimenting. Our customers’ businesses are being built in a much more pragmatic way. They will certainly try new things if it means a more efficiently run business, but it has to be proven first, and they have to trust the provider that’s providing it. Sure, some segments of the market will just look to make cut backs, but others will react by looking for solutions that help them run faster, better and cheaper, and we can address that.

What existing or emerging technologies and practices, if any, will have significant impact on the industry in the coming months?

   Eric Pratt, Founder and CEO of Server Intellect

I personally would like to see a stronger movement and acceptance of Enterprise Level Virtualization. Microsoft did make some movement in this market with Virtual Server 2005, but quickly let it drop to the wayside by not nurturing it with new features and upgrades. I would still like to see Microsoft pay more attention to their Virtualization Product. I feel a company of Microsoft’s size could make a strong impact in this market, and hopefully they are planning to do so in the coming years with their Hyper-V product.

   Urvish Vashi, Director of Product Management, with The Planet

The technology landscape is so fast moving, so our customers look to work with our technical experts to help identify the right requirements for their business. For example, it’s impossible for these companies to keep tabs on virtualization, blade servers and data center efficiency best practices – to name just a few – while running their core business. The emerging trend I see is customers wanting their hosting provider to offer the flexibility to manage some or all of their environment, and to ultimately compliment their team. These companies count on a hosting provider that can navigate that landscape for them, which allows them to choose exactly the right level of technical infrastructure and support capabilities to meet their budgets and requirements.

The hosting provider of the future will ultimately look more like an IT services company rather than a traditional Web host of today, since the consultative nature of the business is emerging. Companies expect their hosting provider to be an extension of their own IT team, and they want a provider that can offer that choice. It’s an exciting time to be in this business with so many companies moving to the hosting model.

   Dan Richfield, CEO and President, EasyCGI

Virtualization is starting to gain a real foothold in the Hosting industry. This goes for both VPS services as a core customer product, as well as the Virtualization of internal systems for hosting companies. VPS servers have a higher opportunity for profit than traditional dedicated server products, and by virtualizing in-house servers, providers stand to make significant cost savings on hardware and associated support costs.

   Marc Burofsky, President, Barak Hosting

We’re seeing an expanding need for more detailed Dedicated environments. Specialized Application hosting will continue to grow. The most important technology making a difference for the industry is Virtualized environments.

   Steve Renda, Vice President of Sales and Marketing, Verio

One major opportunity in the coming months is around globalization. While the US markets may be suffering, other parts of the world are thriving. Demand for our services overseas has grown significantly over the last few years against the weakening dollar. For many of our customers, it’s a big leap to take, and they need someone to advise them how to make that jump, but we have the expertise and the global footprint that will help ease them into these opportunities wherever they may want to go. We also see software services to continue to make a significant impact in the short term. Though there’s been lots said and written about it, it’s still in its relative infancy and rapidly gaining steam. Only the most credible and trusted providers will be able to capitalize on this trend.

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