Canadian telecom providers specialize in outsourced, managed hosting services
Rawlson King, theWHIR.ca
July 4, 2001 -- No longer considered an emerging industry in Canada, complex Web hosting has attracted the interest of many established and start-up IT service integrators.
Many of these integrators came together to display their solutions at "Selecting the Right Web Hoster," a conference which was put together by the Strategy Institute (www.strategyinstitute.com), an independent Canadian, research-based organisation which monitors trends in business strategy. The conference, which was held in Toronto on June 6-7, 2001, examined different aspects of establishing an "e-architecture," which includes security, accessibility and quality-of-service bandwidth.
In many ways, the conference was a great success, because it illustrated that Canadian players are coming into the Web hosting space as providers of more sophisticated and mature services. Most of the hosting service providers in attendance, which included Telus (www.telus.com), WorldCom Canada (www.worldcom.ca), Primus (www.primus.ca) and Sprint Canada (www.sprint.ca), specialize in managed hosting services. Such enhanced hosting services ensure that corporate clientele obtain tailor-made Internet presence solutions that guarantee efficiency, uptime, data integrity and world-class server/network management. By entering the hosting field with a concentration in managed services, Canadian telecom specialists are positioning themselves for rapid growth. According to Forrester Research (www.forrester.com), the market for co-located Web services will shift toward managed Web hosters with infrastructure and architecture acumen. As the market shifts, consumers will demand all-compassing, turnkey solutions from network providers rather than from network management up-starts.
For this reason, Web hosting is one of the fastest growing sectors of the telecom economy in Canada. Recently, Telus made a $100 million investment in its hosting division. AT&T Canada (www.attcanada.com), in a bid to enter the managed hosting field, incorporated Bird on a Wire Networks' (www.boaw.com) managed hosting services into its own offerings, in order to strengthen its own existing hosting portfolio. Primus Canada, Canada's second largest alternative communications carrier, unveiled a full service, high-capacity data centre in downtown Toronto last month. Other incumbent and independent carriers across the country are also building out data centres and thousands of customers are signing up to host their Web sites with third-party providers.
Indeed, the reason for this rapid growth in the Web services sector is due to the cost savings proposition that hosting represents. By outsourcing hosting services, businesses are able to connect to customers, suppliers and employees with immediate high-quality service. For this reason, two-thirds of businesses throughout North America have decided to outsource their Web services infrastructure to hosting service providers. By so doing, they are able to devote less time and fewer resources to managing infrastructure, permitting them to focus more on business processes.
According to Elizabeth Byland, vice-president of Sprint E/Solutions, outsourcing is a powerful solution for medium to large-sized enterprises because it allows them to leverage hefty investments in legacy systems. Outsourcing is advantageous because it allows the enterprise to access a secure and reliable network while managing costs, and further, allows the enterprise to rapidly deploy business applications anywhere on the network. Further, by outsourcing hosting requirements, businesses can leverage the IT skills of technical experts so that they do not have to increase their human capital to maintain Internet infrastructure, allowing the enterprise to gain speed to market and competitive advantage. Since many businesses have been flocking to outsource their Web hosting requirements, telecom providers have begun to respond to the demand, especially in Canada. As a result, expect Canadian telecom providers to offer extremely competitive services at extremely competitive rates, due to Canada's relatively low exchange rate.
