By William Fellows
Internet data center hosting and access provider Exodus Communications Inc says 60% of its customers, some 400 companies, are hosting their enterprise IP and extranet requirements on its data centers. It is the enterprise market on which Exodus has its eyes fixed. 40% of its business is web or dot com hosting, down from 80% dot com and 20% enterprise a short time ago. It also claims it is now the third or fourth largest access provider.
Exodus VP marketing and strategy, Sun Farber does not expect the fast-growing industry to escape the attention of regulators for much longer. The industry could well end up with guidelines for tariffs and settlements, she says.
Exodus manages servers and provides Inktomi-based caching, disaster recovery and Sun DataVault-based security services. Its customers buy their own equipment and bring it to one of Exodus’ 12 internet data centers – there will be 21 by year-end including installations in London and Japan, plus maybe two others. The UK and Germany are the fasted growing markets outside of the US. It can house 10,000 servers in a data center.
Its says its chief competitors aren’t other hosting providers, but the in-house MIS shops; Exodus wants that business. Exodus reckons the 30 biggest users of outsourced internet services are its customers. Frontier Communications and AboveNet (which has two data centers and 100 customers, according to Exodus) are its chief industry competitors. Qwest Communications will be a player in future. It counts Verio as a player in the small to medium- sized market.
It believes the Qwest/Hewlett-Packard apps on tap hosting pact is a Windows NT play against Sun Microsystems Inc’s ASP application service provider drive. It doesn’t believe that Qwest even has a virtual data center up and running yet. It doesn’t count itself as an ASP application service provider, instead it has partnered with Corio Inc for PeopleSoft and Siebel and expects to choose SAP or Baan for an MRP solution.
The differentiator will be how hosting companies build out other services on top of their networks and add professional services. The ability to offer improved content distribution via enhanced caching, load balancing, data mirroring and replication will become increasingly important Farber says. Exodus will offer OC3, OC12 and OC44 speed internet pipes.
IP services will build out beyond IP faxing to voice over IP and intranet and extranet VPNs, markets which Farber says the company will partner to get into. Farber expects the next big thing will be media streaming, and the adoption of quality of service agreements between providers to guarantee faster content delivery.
