(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — In the past year, IT and managed service provider CyberlinkASP (www.cyberlinkasp.com) has gradually recovered from the initial blow of the recession.
The firm has seen significant growth and development from Q1 2009 to Q1 2010 and strong cash flow, as it continues to provide managed hosting, network, storage, outsourced IT and security services to its customers.
The company increased the data center space and upgraded technology at its facility in the Infomart building in Dallas, and added new staff to meet the increased growth.
In addition to these upgrades in its IT infrastructure, CyberlinkASP recently completed its PCI DSS Report on Compliance and SAS 70 Type II audit.
In an email Q&A with the WHIR, Chris M. Lantrip, vice president of CyberlinkASP unveils the details behind the company’s data center expansion at the Infomart facility in Dallas, as well as the company’s growth over the past year.
The WHIR: Can you specify the exact square footage as well as technological upgrades that were involved in the expansion at the Infomart facility in Dallas?
Chris M. Lantrip: We have been with the same provider in Infomart for the past few years and spent late 08 and all of 09 beefing up staff, obtaining all of our necessary compliance mandates and tripling our available capacity. We invested significantly on the infrastructure side and are comfortable that we now have the people/personnel and capacities to double the existing size of the business with negligible expansion costs. So, the framework is in place and the investments have been made to accommodate the next 24 months of growth. It was important to us that we have significant runway going into the next few years (given our growth rate) and to give us more flexibility as we see more and more strategic opportunities cross our desk. We’ve flown below the radar the last few years, keeping our heads down and building a nice cash flow business with a clean balance sheet and above average EBITDA margins and our shareholders have made the decision to really hit the accelerator.
So we tripled our floor space on the infrastructure side, we replaced Extreme front end switches with all Cisco routers running full BGP route tables and load balanced all PDU’s for efficient fail over and management. We also went ahead and implemented a separate management network for out of band access to all servers, PDU’s, switches, blade enclosures, SANs, and backup devices. In addition we made a significant investment on the software side and implemented Citrix Xenapp server upgrade to Version 5.5. As a part of this upgrade we migrated half of all hosted applications to VM for increased power efficiency and redundancy. We also quadrupled blade capacity with Dell M1000 blade chassis and migrated to Windows 2008 R2 for AD servers, and MS SQL servers while simultaneously implementing 48Gb switched stacking network rings. The rings are connected via 10GB fiber for total redundancy. Upgraded to Fortigate 620B’s utilizing Vdom technology to separate customers as well as new SAN and NAS storage units totaling over 100 TB’s for backup and VM imaging. We also replaced all equipment racks for better wire management and cooling.
The press release states that the data center expansion was intended to meet the needs of a growth in customers. How much of an increase in customer count has CyberlinkASP seen?
CL: While late 2008 and 2009 were without exception a challenging time, we did experience a double digit percentage increase in customer adds going into Q1 2010 over the previous period(s). Our solution is essentially off balance sheet financing for a company’s IT infrastructure, cap-ex vs. op-ex, build or outsource. During this period capex was in short supply, so we were not at all surprised with the steady performance.
To what factors would you attribute this customer growth?
CL: We think it’s a couple of things: We have found a real niche in healthcare which continues to be an underserved and dynamic industry. Throughout the Great Recession we saw a great deal of expansion, stability and continuity from this portion of our business and this seems to be continuing into 2010. Our application service business provides each medical facility we serve with end-to-end support. Via the Citrix XenApp and our sophisticated support personnel and ticketing capabilities, our staff is able to troubleshoot and resolve any client issues from server to desktop. Our experience has been that this is unique to the marketplace, with most hosters managing equipment at the data center level only. We go all the way to the end user and have had a great deal of success as more and more IT Directors and CIO’s opt to outsource the desktop management piece in addition to application delivery, or simply do not want the hassle of configuring printers, patch management etc. And we have been able to do this while maintaining gross margins between 35 percent and 40 percent across the entire business, year over year.
With this continued growth in customers and business does CyberlinkASP have any plans on acquiring or building its own data center?
CL: That’s a good question and one we have certainly discussed internally and with our partners. We definitely like our revenue per square foot ROI but our capex dollars are more valuable to us at this point deployed within our product matrix. We do appreciate the scalability and flexibility that our facilities partners offer us at this stage in our growth. Also, our strategic Infomart location provides unparalleled access to interconnection points for our managed BGP infrastructure in addition to one of the most robust power and operating environments in the industry. So, for now we are quite pleased with our current arrangement but will continue to evaluate as our expansion continues, we are always looking at strategic transactions and have a number of opportunities in the pipeline.
Tell me a little bit more about the importance of PCI DSS report on compliance, which CyberlinkASP recently completed.
CL: This was a major initiative for us in 2008 and 2009 as more and more firms require documented security policies and procedures relating to IT. We feel it’s a must for anyone hosting or managing mission critical information technology. We currently manage a back end application that services hundreds of financial services firms and we want all of our clients to know we value the integrity and protection of their data. This demonstrates and documents our commitment and gives assurances to our medical clients that we are capable and can be trusted with HIPAA sensitive data.
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