Web Hosting Reviews of Website Hosting Companies for your small to medium sized business, including email, domain name registration and web design software.
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Web Hosting News February 2, 2005 GeoTrust Gaining European Market Share SSL certificate authority GeoTrust (geotrust.com) said on Tuesday that according to data compiled by research and analysis firm Netcraft's (netcraft.com) December 2004 SSL survey, it is continuing to increase its market share in Europe. According to Netcraft's survey, GeoTrust showed exceptional growth in the UK and Germany, the two largest SSL markets in Europe. GeoTrust's SSL certificate sales grew by 88 percent in the UK and 363 percent in Germany. Netcraft's data showed that VeriSign, the second fastest gainer, was well behind with seven and six percent growth in the UK and Germany respectively. "Industry-leading companies and organizations across Europe, including Actinic, BskyB, Deutsche Bank, ITV, Scottish Parliament and Patent Office, and Northern Ireland's Department of Justice, are turning to GeoTrust for quick, affordable digital certificates," says Paul Tourret, managing director of GeoTrust Europe. "With over 400 European-specific resellers, including 1&1, Trustzone and CPS-Datensysteme, GeoTrust has built an infrastructure that is poised to maintain the continued growth it experienced in 2004." Neal Creighton, CEO of GeoTrust, said European customers are quickly realizing the benefits of a GeoTrust certificate that takes only minutes, rather than days, to issue. New Method Could Lead to Spam Increase Anti-spam organization Spamhaus (spamhaus.org) has warned that spammers have developed new and more effective methods of sending unsolicited bulk email, foreshadowing a surge in spam around the world, reports say. Spamhaus says the new software takes over a computer and uses it to send spam through that particular machine's Internet service provider. With spam appearing to come from a variety of ISPs, filtering technology will be unable to combat the problem by simply blocking domains from those ISPs. According to a number of reports, various Internet service providers in the United States have already been affected by the new spamming technique. Knocking Down the Walls In my column entitled "What the Mergers Mean," which appeared in the September issue of the WHIR, I examined the implications of the dramatic increase in the number of mergers and acquisitions within the hosting industry. As I stated in that column, the consolidation of the hosting industry is part of a natural evolution driven by growing demand among enterprise customers for full-service providers that can satisfy their multidimensional information technology and communications needs. There is a related trend that is leading to a growing number of Web hosting service providers being acquired by large IT integrators and outsourcers. One of the most recent examples of this trend is SunGard's announcement in November that it is acquiring Denver-based Inflow, Inc. Inflow will be merged with SunGard's Availability Services operating group which provides disaster recovery and business continuity services to over 10,000 corporate clients, predominantly in North America and Europe. Prior to the acquisition, SunGard managed more than 3 million square feet of off-site facilities and offered a range of dedicated high availability or less time-sensitive managed IT and professional services. Inflow gives SunGard additional application hosting and managed services capabilities and resources, including a Denver, Colorado based network operations center and 14 data centers. SunGard's move follows Affiliated Computer Services's acquisition of BlueStar Solutions in August. ACS is a leading business process and IT outsourcing services company that acknowledged it was acquiring BlueStar to broaden its applications management capabilities in packaged enterprise resource planning and messaging services. These acquisitions follow the model established by EDS, which was the first major IT outsourcer to acquire a new generation hosting company in 2002 when it purchased LoudCloud's hosting business. In each of these cases, the established IT service companies made their acquisitions to overcome similar business challenges. First, they each faced changing customer demands. In the past, IT integration and outsourcing service companies like SunGard, ACS and EDS could sell high-priced, long-term disaster recovery contracts, professional service engagements or large-scale outsourcing agreements to enterprises that needed to protect, upgrade or offload their IT operations. While enterprises are currently seeking to offload as much of their IT operations as possible, they have become tired of a series of IT integration and outsourcing failures. Rather than continue to accept costly and inflexible IT integration and outsourcing services, enterprise customers are now demanding less expensive, more pliable, "pay-as-you-go" hosting and managed services. These services enable enterprises to mitigate their risk because they can be purchased incrementally as the need arises. The second challenge facing traditional IT integration and outsourcing service companies is their lack of internal skills and experience in building managed and hosting services. They have also been unable to scale these services down into smaller packages to satisfy the more specific needs of small and medium-sized businesses. With the cost of acquiring existing managed service providers and hosting companies at one to two times revenues, it has become more economical for IT integration and outsourcing companies to buy rather than build these service capabilities. This strategy also enables these companies to acquire the experienced staff to guide their service delivery, marketing and sales efforts. Hosted and managed applications, IT infrastructure, messaging, remote access, security and network services are all experiencing greater demand from enterprises of all sizes. A growing number of IT integration and outsourcing companies see buying MSPs and hosting companies as the best ticket to satisfying their customers' changing needs and remaining competitive. This buy versus build strategy gives the IT integration and outsourcing companies a quicker path to broaden their portfolio of services, accelerate their route to market, and increase their service delivery skills. This trend also suggests that managed hosting services are becoming a more important part of the mainstream IT services package. The merging of traditional IT and new generation managed hosting service companies is an outgrowth of a similar merging of enterprise customers' IT support needs. This trend is knocking down the wall between traditional IT integration and outsourcing services and the new generation of managed hosting services.
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