By Philbert Shih, theWHIR.com
November 21, 2005 — (WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — Hosting automation software developers build solutions that enable Web hosts to automate and manage every aspect of their business. However, telecommunications carriers, with their large portfolio of offerings, present a unique set of challenges, says Sphera (sphera.com) which recently announced a new contract with Bellsouth (bellsouth.com).
BellSouth has been in the shared hosting business since 1997, outsourcing its entire hosting platform to NTT/Verio. But when Tim Hill, director of portal and shared hosting services, took over the hosting operations in late 2002, BellSouth began a re-evaluation process. Among its many goals, BellSouth wanted to reduce costs, streamline its systems and be able to efficiently add new service offerings.
Hill concluded, after a process that ran until the spring of 2003, that in order to achieve these and other objectives, it would have to discontinue the outsourcing arrangement and bring hosting back in-house. BellSouth reviewed the infrastructure management solutions of a range of leading vendors, and in December of 2003 settled on Denver-based data center and hosting automation vendor Sphera.
Sphera based the hosting platform for BellSouth on its HostingBusiness Suite product, an end-to-end solution for automating, provisioning and managing a Web hosting platform. The solution is deployed in a BellSouth data center facility, running on Hewlett-Packard storage area networks and servers.
BellSouth also took advantage of Sphera’s migration technology to move its hosting infrastructure from NTT/Verio to the Sphera/BellSouth platform. Sphera’s MigrationDirector supports HostingBusiness Suite implementations and in less than a month, BellSouth was able to migrate more than 100,000 Web sites, email, FTP and e-commerce accounts with little incident, says Hill.
One of the things BellSouth wanted was more control over its product roadmap and the ability to integrate hosting with its other communications service offerings, explains Michael Gold, CEO of Sphera. With Sphera in place, BellSouth is able to offer Windows-, Linux- and Solaris-based hosting offerings, hosted applications such as Exchange and Sharepoint and advanced email and e-commerce capabilities, all from a single platform. BellSouth has already used Sphera to bundle hosting with its DSL Internet service offerings, says Hill.
The impetus, Hill says, has been customer demand and the need to react to the rapidly changing nature of the market. “BellSouth’s small and medium business customers have expressed an ongoing need for Web hosting with advanced email and commerce capabilities,” Hill said in a release. “By bringing the Web hosting platform in-house with Sphera, we can meet these increasing customer needs as they evolve.”
BellSouth has been pleased with the results so far. One of the key reasons for bringing hosting in-house with Sphera was to achieve better economies of scale and reduce overhead. And according to Hill, the company is saving millions of dollars a year and has brought customer churn down to below 2.5 percent, a rate considered excellent by most industry standards.
“The Sphera platform has enabled us to provide better customer services,” says Hill. “It’s easier to use, its easier to change, it’s easier to switch, its easier to add features, upgrade and downgrade [and] from a technical support perspective, its much easier for us to provide a better experience to the customer.”
Gold says Sphera was able to land the BellSouth deal because of the company’s focus on the needs of telecommunications carriers, a group from which Sphera is currently seeing significant demand for hosting automation. “While we do have some traditional mid-sized hosting companies, for the most part, our product development efforts and our sales efforts are geared to meeting the needs of telcos,” Gold says.
In addition to high levels of scalability, telcos require a platform to have a generous degree of openness, says Gold, so that they can integrate with back-end systems. Flexibility, as BellSouth demanded, is also important. Sphera’s software development kit enables the smooth and rapid addition of new applications as well as the modification of package offerings already available.
As Gold explains, “a hosting company that just does Web hosting is a more discrete system, but a telco has a slew of services.” And because of this, telcos must consider hosting management and automation solutions like Sphera that are attuned to their specific needs.
