Alabanza Aims for Additional Growth With Software Offering

By Adam Eisner, theWHIR.com

April 1, 2002 - As the technical needs of Web hosting companies and resellers become more complex, an increasing number of companies are coming to market with products and services aimed at helping automate the hosting process.

While few of these companies were in business prior to the tech boom, Baltimore-based Alabanza not only was one of automation's innovators - the company says it also coined the phrase "hosting automation."

"We think we did," says Paul Zohorksy, President of Alabanza (alabanza.com). "Other people will quibble with us... but we've been doing automation since 1998."

Alabanza was originally founded in 1996 as a Web hosting company. Soon after, however, the company "decided that automation was the key, and we rolled out a product in 1998 that allowed that to happen," Zohorksy says. Today, Alabanza services more than 500 hosting businesses that manage a total of 250,000 Web sites and more than one million email accounts worldwide.

Alabanza's hosting suite, which automates everything from billing and server administration to site creation for end users, was originally made available on an ASP basis - clients would typically make use of Alabanza's hosting automation suite by housing customers on servers located within Alabanza's data center.

Earlier this year, however, Alabanza made its automation software available separate from the company's facilities and hosting services. As a result, clients can now choose to locate Alabanza's software suite in their own data center, in a neutral data center, or have Alabanza handle the software and hosting requirements like before.

Zohorksy says one of the main reasons Alabanza decided to commoditize its product was because although the Internet is international by nature, "it still has a geographic component to it," he says. "30 per cent of our clients are international." This makes it difficult for companies like Alabanza to provide ASP services to varied geographic regions, as routing traffic to a Web hosting company's servers via Baltimore doesn't make much sense. "There's quite a hop you have to make," Zohorksy says.

Alabanza also wanted to provide a technically sophisticated product to higher-end clients like telecommunications firms, most of which would typically rather integrate an automation product in to their own system rather than outsource it to another company in a different data center. "[Telcos] may want to plug in their own billing application in to our product, and they can do that," Zohorksy says. "Or if they want to bring a CRM tool, or customer support tool... they can plug that in as well."

Another reason Alabanza decided to make the platform more widely available was customer demand, Zohorsky says, as clients were asking for a software version of the platform. "If people keep saying this, there's a reason," he says. Zohorksy also thinks hosting firms will now be able to use their geographic location to their advantage, particularly when targeting local vertical markets. "To a vertical channel... it just makes more sense for them with their customer base to be able to do it in a geographic sense of focus," he says. "I think they'll be much more successful if they host that way."

Now that Web hosting firms have an increased set of options when deciding to make use of Alabanza's hosting platform, Zorhorsky says the company's next step will be to improve on the Alabanza product that Web hosts are currently using. A next-generation version of the company's software will come out later in the year, and will "give people a lot more functionality, [and] ability to plug in a lot more tools, and we're looking at being able to do Web services," Zohorsky says. Giving Web hosting firms a greater amount of choice when implementing Alabanza's hosting platform will also help the company target markets outside North America, something Zorhorsky says the company would like to do more. "The fact that we've grown is a factor of how international the Internet is," he says. "But I think as we continue to grow, we'll take advantage of more geographic-focused resellers."