February 20, 2004 -- (WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) -- Though conventional wisdom favors selling to enterprises, the leaders of Tucows (tucows.com) - a company renowned for providing wholesale Internet services to Web hosts and ISPs - vowed to keep their focus on the small to medium-sized market. Ten years after Tucows' inception, its chief executive officer credits that decision as a key to the company's success.
"We made a bet on the health and future of small to medium-sized service providers," said Elliot Noss, Tucows president and CEO. "That, from a strategic direction, has served us extremely well."
Tucows is celebrating its successes this month, as the company marks its 10th anniversary. The milestone tops an ever-growing list of achievements, new product launches and partnerships formed over the last decade.
Tucows (an acronym for The Ultimate Collection Of Winsock Software) was born a software download site and quickly earned a reputation for being the first to provide software on a "freeware" or "shareware" basis.
Three years later, the Toronto-based company was acquired by Internet Direct, one of its ISP mirror sites, also based in Toronto. Noss recognizes this merger, which allowed Tucows to work with a local provider and offer fast downloads, as one of the first significant steps that helped the company burst into the global market. "We were the way that most of Europe and Asia would get their software," he said.
The company continued to flourish, receiving its ICAAN registrar accreditation and launching OpenSRS to provide outsourced domain name registration and other Internet services to its resellers.
Now, with almost four million domain names and a network of 5,000 resellers in 100 countries, Tucows has become the world's second largest domain name registrar for generic top-level domains, country code top-level domains and internationalized domain names. Tucows network now offers 30,000 software titles to mirror sites.
The company continues to expand with new product launches and partnerships. Just recently Tucows began including digital certificates, e-mail services and managed DNS in their service offering. Last month, Tucows announced an alliance with Solis, a Japanese reseller of Internet infrastructure products, making Solis the primary point of distribution of Tucows' services in that region.
"We recognize Asia's very unique - both as a region broadly, but especially, in terms of each individual market there. You can't compete in this market without addressing local language and culture issues," Noss said, adding that business hours and customer payment methods are other issues that need to be addressed when dealing with foreign countries. "The closer you can be to your customers, the more successful you are going to be."
This celebratory year will also mark a renewed effort by Tucows to stay connected with all of its customers, not just those in Asia. While keeping its target on the small to medium-sized market, Noss said Tucows will focus on developing unique marketing strategies and products to help Web companies broaden services, keeping in tune with customer needs.
