Gary Flood talks to the CEO of Ultraspeed, Jordan Gross, about managed hosting, virtualisation and service level agreements.
Q. So Ultraspeed is a managed hosting provider. What makes you stand out from the crowd – there are lots of companies like you vying for customer business out there?
A. Obviously we don’t think we are the same as everyone else. Indeed, we are often genuinely surprised as to what some people think is good enough to let them call themselves a managed hosting company. Having 20 white boxes in a rack and a couple of hard drives is just not what customers should be settling for.
Q. What do you think managed hosting should be offering as a service, then?
A. We see ourselves as third line engineering support available 100% of the time, looking to resolve any customer query or technical issue within 5 minutes of a call no matter what hour of the day or night; we also offer a 15 minute hardware swap-out guarantee if a customer requires that. To do that you need the best technology and the best service layer on top, which we argue that we have been doing since 1998.
Q. I’m sure. But there are if you like 20 cereal boxes marked ‘managed hosting’ in the IT supermarket. I still need to know what makes you different and the one I should work with.
A. The technology is the basis. My CTO will tell you that we see things holistically in a way competitors just don’t. There, we have spent a lot of time getting the very best infrastructure we can for our clients. We are totally virtualised – we’re a major VMware partner, for example – coupled with very high availability storage area networks synchronised across our two data centres, one in London and one in Amsterdam. We combine all that with dedicated customer service, which I think is a claim backed up by the fact that we have clients who’ve been with us, 10, 11, 12 years.
Q. And you’ve been around 13, so yes, that sounds good. Long time to be a private company though, some might carp.
A. There’s a simple answer to that. I don’t want to run a public company so we will stay as we are.
Q. Why?
A. Public companies are too restrained by the whole quarterly results thing, too focused on short-term or at best medium-term planning. I want to plan for the long term, to be able to put the resources I need to into R&D and what I need to deliver long-term, satisfactory customer relationships.
Q. I still somehow feel we haven’t got to the nub of the Ultraspeed USP. Tell us about the markets you address?
A. Sure. So we are dedicated overwhelmingly to the mid-market company, working with CIOs, CTOs and IT managers for that class of company, overwhelmingly in the UK. Our customers include the British Heart Foundation, Cookson Plc and Bl0nde Digital.
Q. What makes a company of that size a potential Ultraspeed client?
A. We have a rule of thumb that if you are spending over £400,000 a year on running your IT, desktops, servers, and so on, then you should get someone in to design the right infrastructure for you, though we’d argue it should be co-located for maximum efficiency. But under that – you will benefit from someone like us coming in to help you. We have a client, a large multinational headquartered in London, that is a big company but actually had a modest IT resource in that main office. It ran a comparative test on whether or not a move to fully virtualised desktops and outsourced IT could be done best by working with us or by internal investment and we won out. So that’s a very strong customer reference for us now;
we see a lot of examples like that and I think we’ll see more.
Q. Why – the tight economy, you mean?
A. CIOs are being told to cut budgets by x% and that can be quite scary. So I think there’s a lot of getting dusty old contracts out of drawers going on, a lot of careful evaluation to see what can be rationalised, made more efficient, outsourced. In effect, the moves by some big Government Departments tell us there are no sacred cows any more, nothing is as ring-fenced as what it used to be.
Q. You see that as opportunity, of course.
A. We do, and so our message to CIOs is to evaluate a wider scope of the market than you may traditionally have, taking careful look at SLAs and what you can get out there. The SLA point is important as a careful reading of the fine print may tell you apples aren’t necessarily being compared to apples out there.
