Customer support is undoubtedly a topic in our industry people can get very passionate, dare I say, "fanatical" about.

So when a company, like Bobcares, dedicates its entire business to providing outsourced support as a service - and currently boasts a clientele of over 3.5 million websites - passionate could arguably be seen as somewhat of an understatement.

Serving the hosting industry for almost a decade, Bobcares says it offers support plans for dedicated administration facility, server administration plans, helpdesk plans and telephone support plans.

WHIRtv recently caught up with Amarjyoti Krishnan, co-founder of Bobcares, and gained some insight into the philosophy behind the service and where he envisions the company going in the next few years.

The WHIR team recently had the pleasure of attending Microsoft's fourth annual Hosting Summit in Seattle, WA (which, for the record, is breath-takingly gorgeous and seems to have a unique balance between man and nature, and I could go on and on, but I digress). Hopefully you followed the ever-eloquent Liam Eagle in his live coverage of the event and checked out some of the photos from the summit on our Flickr site.

Lucky for us, after the summit we had the opportunity to explore Microsoft's campus in Redmond (we saw the executive offices that Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer work in AND played in Microsoft's museum) and took a moment to chat to a familiar guest on WHIRtv, Michael van Dijken, Microsoft's lead marketing manager for hosted services. Michael had some enlightening things to say regarding the direction Microsoft is taking with its partners through these events.

In the coming week we'll be bringing you some of the attendee feedback we collected from the event, and let me just say that the openness and willingness from Microsoft's partners to share their thoughts and opinions was rather impressive.

I also wanted to bring to your attention that WHIRtv is now available through iTunes so if you want these videos conveniently delivered to you every time we post a new one, be sure to subscribe here.

As mentioned in the last post where we showcased some exhibitor and attendee feedback from Webhosting Day 2008, here we have an interview with Michael Korbacher, the director of Web and application, Hosting Communications Sector, Microsoft International.

He had some enlightening things to say about the launch of Windows Server 2008, Microsoft's developer network and what the company's been up to, but from a more of an International standpoint.

And on the topic of Microsoft, theWHIR's editor-in-chief, Liam Eagle, our director of marketing and business development Candice Rodriguez, and yours truly with the WHIRtv team will be attending Microsoft's 2008 Hosting Summit in Seattle next week, so if you see us around, definitely come up and say hello!

While the WHIR's editor-in-chief Liam Eagle has provided us with some fantastic up-to-the minute coverage from Webhosting Day, which you can still catch on his blog here, WHIRtv was also on location gathering event footage and interviews with some key players in the European hosting market. (Let's also take a moment to note that as much as we try to describe the surreal atmosphere with the venue, there really is no better way to relay this to you than through images and video!)

To kick off our European coverage, here's an interview with the event organizer, Thomas Strohe, who discusses the event's rapid growth, some hot topics in the European hosting market and his overall vision for Webhosting Day.

In the following days and weeks we'll be posting feedback from exhibitors and attendees as well as interviews with Microsoft, Parallels and other key European players that were attending the event.

While customer approval program operator RatePoint was in Toronto, we met up with its CEO and co-founder Neal Creighton and chatted with him about RatePoint's unique service, what it offers to partners and resellers and the demand he sees it drumming up in the near future.

TAGS: RatePoint

Sandip Gupta is a person we've met and interviewed for online features and WHIR TV segments quite a few times over the past couple of years and since his exit from Ensim, we hadn't really heard from him or knew much about his situation. But at this year's HostingCon 2007, Sandip was back representing NetMagic Solutions, a managed service provider from India, which he's been heading as president and placed responsible for the company's international expansion and corporate strategy.

Placing great value in his past relations with people, he contacted us for an interview (which I was quite happy to oblige to, by the way, because of how incredibly pleasant he is) and gave us a rundown on the company he's been representing, it's unique service to the industry and what he's been up to for the past year.

We unfortunately ran into some technical issues with the audio, so we'll be sharing transcribes of our interviews with you instead. Sorry for any inconvenience.

WHIR TV: You're a familiar face on WHIR TV, but we haven't seen you in a while, really since your Ensim days. What have you been up to since leaving that position?

SG: About a year back, I left Ensim and using my experience in the hosting industry and the enterprise virtualization space I worked with about a dozen companies, advising them about different strategies of how to market, how to raise money and so on and so forth. So, I was getting a wide variety of experience but I was looking for the right opportunity and then I came across NetMagic, which I joined about two months back.

WHIR TV: What drew you to this company in particular?

SG: NetMagic is in a unique position. It's an India-based managed service provider, so we offer hosting as well as managed services in India. We have four data centers in India and we host about 500 medium-to-large sized customers that are multinational corporations. The business was incubated by the founders of Exodus and I knew the founders, the investors and the board members. Anyway, I found it intriguing that their business could be extended to other parts of the world, not for hosting or for managed services but for remote infrastructure management. What that is, is that remotely on a 24-by-seven basis, we can offer management and monitoring of various IT assets that run a data center, whether it is a commercial or enterprise data center. So anything from networks to servers to OS to applications, we can collectively monitor that and provide the right set of alerts and reports to the IT operations team so they can go and do high-value stuff and provide the right SLAs to their customers.

WHIR TV: How big of an issue is this idea of infrastructure management? Is it something that you've found is in particular demand?

SG: If you look at the present, there is a four percent unemployment rate in the US and in the high-tech space. What that means is that it's very difficult to hire people that provide that level of expertise you need to run streamlined operations and management. And each of these service providers are looking to offer more and more managed services because that gives them a high-margin revenue. For them, to be able to accomplish that, they have to be able to hire a lot of these highly trained, highly skilled people and to be able to do that and to scale their business, it's just very challenging. That's where we see this opportunity where we can supplement the IT operations of such providers and such enterprises, where they can outsource their level 1, level 2 and level 3 support to us and provide the SLA that they're promising to their end-customer.

WHIR TV: What kind of solutions do you actually offer to these service providers?

SG: Just to give you an example, we have a global VPN provider that runs in 40 different countries and we have a dedicated NOC, where we add a virtual NOC to their NOC and have 40 dedicated reps focused on the provisioning, monitoring and management of their solutions. Then we have a data center operator in Texas where we're able to put together a 20 people team for them and we manage all their server infrastructure. So, a lot of these service providers are looking for a combination of offerings. It can be time slicing where they can do it during the day in their location and we do it during the night in India. Or they're looking to do it from a price-point perspective where they want to see it per device, for example. And they also want to do it based on stack, where they want to deal with the servers and we do the applications and the OS. So there are a number of different combinations that we can work with the service provider to offer these services. Because we are a services company, we like to work with each service provider customer to come up with a customized solution that targets their SLA and the customer satisfaction methods that they want to provide.

WHIR TV: So, what were your goals with HostingCon and what are some strategies you've used to fulfill these goals?

SG: The audience here is a key vertical for our business where the service providers are not only customers to us but also channel partners. A lot of these service providers are offering managed services to the end-customer, which we can private-label with them behind the scenes and enable them to provide.

Also, I've been in this industry for almost 10 years now and I know the dynamics and the players in the industry and one of my key strategies is to do the best that you know, and some people may go against that, but I believe in my relationships so this is the first vertical that we're targeting. We've also launched an office in southern California and we're planning on expanding to other areas across the US to not only cover the geography but also the verticals of the industry. Slowly we'll also expand to Europe and Asia to provide these services.

WHIR TV: What's your overall vision for NetMagic Solutions?

SG: Our vision is that we want to marry our data center management expertise and offer that worldwide to really dissipate our knowledge and provide the value to the end customer and in the process, of course, make a lot of money.

TAGS: HostingCon, "NetMagic Solutions"

Paul Stapleton, the managing director at media, Internet and telecommunications investment banking firm DH Capital is a recurring face at most, if not all, of the hosting events we attend. So, while we were at HostingCon 2007 we decided to sit down with him for a chat and gain some insight into his enthusiastic interest and steadfast belief in the Web hosting merger and acquisition scene.

We unfortunately ran into some technical issues with the audio, so we'll be sharing transcriptions of our interviews with you instead. Sorry for any inconvenience.

WHIR TV: We always seem to see you around at these hosting events. What's behind your interest with the Web hosting industry?

PS: Well, myself and several of my partners at DH Capital have been focused on hosting and recurring revenues over the broadband Internet for well over a decade. So our interest in hosting is just a natural extension of the merger and acquisition advice we've been providing over the last 10 years.

WHIR TV: Why are you here at HostingCon in particular?

PS: We think it's quite important to get involved early with operators. We pride ourselves in knowing how the business actually works as well as the financial side. And it's an unregulated business, you can't just pick up a directory and get statistics. You have to go out and meet the people and walking the tradeshow floor is a great way to do that.

Also, we have a thesis about what online advertising can look like as a revenue stream inside the hosting business. We think the hosting business has extraordinary insight into what's happening on the box, who's coming to the box and how long they're staying. We think that's a wonderful recipe for building an online advertising revenue stream so we're out looking for companies who agree with that message and are building products like middleware, software, analytics to build online revenue into the hosting business.

WHIR TV: Would you say that there's a lot of activity going on in terms of mergers and acquisitions in hosting? Is there a lot of interest?

PS: Well, there's always interest. Entrepreneurs work very hard to receive a big payday. In terms of activity, we've described the activity in hosting as just coming into its maturity. And what I mean by that is, if you look backwards, transactions to date have been a lot of small transactions where people are buying other peoples' customer accounts rather than a sustainable cash-flowing business or a very few large transactions. But we think there's a whole middle-market of activity that's about to occur and come online in the next couple of years.

WHIR TV: Really? Can you elaborate on that?

PS: Well, if you're a $5 to 25 million hosting company today you probably have very nice cash flows and sustainability to those cash flows. You also probably know an awful lot about your customer-base, how much they churn, what they pay you per month and what your margin is on that. That allows you to calculate the value of your business. And as that becomes more clear and more and more risk is pushed out, we think these businesses are just becoming more and more valuable.

WHIR TV: What kind of advice would you give a company that is interested in putting out its business for acquisition? How can they prep themselves for it?

PS: These businesses are very good at the infrastructure side, the technology side. I would encourage them to spend more time understanding and managing their channel, their marketing and their sales. Study your customer base. Really understand it. Who's buying from you and why, what your churn looks like, what does your revenue per unit look like and what does your cash flow look like? With that data, and the historical data looking back, we can help you determine your valuation quite easily.

WHIR TV: Would you say that there is a growing interest from businesses outside of Web hosting that are starting to want to get involved in this industry?

PS: Honestly, new money is not quite here yet. However, our thesis is that that's going to change given the strong economic drivers of the business. We've seen it in other parallel recurring revenue Internet industries before. We saw it 10-years-ago in the dial-up industry, we're seeing it right now in the large-scale facilities-based enterprise hosting category. We think it's only a matter of time.

WHIR TV: How big do you think Web hosting will be in terms of a market perspective?

PS: It's hard to say. You get into questions of definition. You get into a bunch of assumptions. We take comfort in the fact that it's a service business that can support lots of well-run businesses and you can build a great company in this category almost regardless of how big the overall market is if you understand your customers and the product sets they want.

TAGS: "HostingCon 2007", "DH Capital"

During Layered Technologies' partner conference LTPact 2007, we also had the opportunity to sit down with Bert Armijo, the VP of sales and marketing from 3Tera and ask him some questions about one of the hottest topics during the event: utility computing.

With 3Tera representing one of the strongest proponents of grid technology in the hosting industry, it was interesting to hear Bert discuss the virtues of utility computing, the company's new virtual private data center joint offering with Layered Technologies and the next future project for 3Tera.

TAGS: "Layered Technologies", LTPact 2007, 3Tera, "utility computing"

While at Layered Technologies' second annual partner event LT Pact 2007, I had the opportunity to sit down with Andy Schroepfer, president and founder of research and analysis firm Tier 1 Research and ask him some questions about his keynote and overall thoughts on the industry.

I have to admit that interviewing Andy was quite a treat (and a long-time coming!) as I always enjoy hearing him speak during his keynotes because not only does he have some insightful and fascinating things to say about the state of the industry, but he's a pretty dynamic personality, and thus speaker, as well.

Watch the interview to see what he has to say about our industry's rapidly-approaching eruption, the pros and cons to utility computing and how Web hosts can stay on top of their game during this inevitable time of change.

TAGS: "Layered Technologies", LT Pact 2007, "Tier 1 Research", "utility computing"

While at Layered Technologies' second annual partner event LT Pact 2007, I sat down with Michael Platner, the CEO of Layered Technologies, and got his thoughts on the event, what he hoped attendees took away from the conference, his views on grid and utility computing and his belief on why it will become the way of the future.

TAGS: LT Pact, Layered Technologies, utility computing