By Liam Eagle, theWHIR.com
January 23, 2006 — (WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — Web hosting giant Verio (verio.com) has been involved with the business as long as almost any other company, and through several iterations. The business of Web hosting has changed dramatically during the company’s 10-year tenure and, of course, the company has undergone changes of its own to accommodate developments in the business.
On Monday of this week, Verio announced that it had begun 2006 by reorganizing its business to sharpen the company’s focus on the hosting requirements of small and medium-sized businesses. Verio, a subsidiary of Japanese telecommunications firm NTT Communications, will shift the operation of its enterprise hosting, unmanaged dedicated hosting and colocation businesses to NTT America, which will serve those clients under the new brand.
To complement its tightened focus, Verio’s reorganization has set the company up with some new management, appointing Dennis Boyle to the role of chief operations officer and NTT executive Kiyoshi Maeda as the company’s CEO.
According to Boyle, however, the new organizational structure and management do not include any mandate for change, but rather a sharpening of the company’s focus in the US.
The shift, says Boyle, will leave Verio operating shared hosting, virtual private server hosting and managed-type dedicated hosting – the sort of services that SMB customers demand, with a focus more oriented toward an Internet presence than the technology behind it.
According to Boyle, the reorganization will leave Verio with almost all its customers, as NTTA takes over roughly 3,000 of the company’s 600,000 total clients, but with much more consistency in the size and focus of those customers. And both companies will continue to serve those customers from the same facilities.
“It’s going to be a shared space,” says Boyle. “Our primary data centers in San Jose and Sterling, Virginia are NTTA-owned data centers, and we will now become their largest customer, so it’s a shared resource.”
Part of that focus on SMB customers will be, over the course of 2006, the launch of a series of new tools for those customers.
Boyle says Verio plans to launch a set of new marketing tools and professional services to help small businesses with search engine placement and optimization. The company also plans to launch a series of educational resources and campaigns, designed to assist its customers, partners and resellers.
Verio’s reseller business has played a significant role in the company’s development over the years, and Boyle says the relationship of resellers with the company will hardly see any changes as a result of the restructuring.
“The majority of our reseller business,” he says, “probably 98 to 99 percent of it, has been in the shared Web hosting and the VPS market space. There has been a customer here or there that has taken on a dedicated solution. But those will, for the most part, stay under that program.”
The change itself is not a such a big change for Verio, which until quite recently operated as a set of business units under the umbrella of NTT Communications.
“It was about a year and a half ago that Verio went through taking all the business units and making them into one functional company, rather than business units,” says Boyle. “So it was primarily just going back to the situation we had before, but rather than business units, Verio is now a stand-alone company focusing on the SMB market space.”
And, according to Boyle, the people involved in the management of Verio are very enthusiastic about the company’s new focus and its potential to make a big impact in hosting in 2006.
“We have a lot of people in the organization who are really fired up about the opportunity to focus on the business they’ve helped grow over these years,” he says, “and are really re-energized that we’ve made a commitment to do so.”
