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Web Hosting
News
Web Site
Building Tools
October 18, 2004
Though the early growth of Web
hosting was driven by the technical know-how of early adopters, most hosts
agree that the industry's future is tied to the approximately 7.5 million
small to medium-sized businesses in the United States that, as a group,
have been slow to open storefronts in cyberspace.
Providers trying to tap into the massive SMB market are expanding their
services with offerings unlike anything demanded by the early-adopter
crowd. Intrinsic to the industry's movement toward such value-added
services as Web site building software is the prediction that the
non-technical SMB market will continue to demand broader business building
offerings from shared hosting providers.
In hosting's early days, all that was expected of a hosting provider was a
platform from which to launch the Web sites of businesses that had their
own technical staffs. Customers were provided with servers, bandwidth and
a few tools. These early adopters had the technical expertise to do
everything else.
As the market of early adopters dwindled, more hosting providers began
pursuing the SMB market, which is generally less familiar with Web site
building. Site builder software made it unnecessary for business owners to
learn HTML to build their sites or to stay abreast of any technology
required to update content.
In 2002, Interland (interland.com) furthered its intent to capture the SMB
market segment by acquiring Trellix Corporation, the leading developer of
software-based Web site solutions. The acquisition not only allowed
Interland to integrate a site-building tool with its hosting platform but
also brought in a whole application-launching platform for lead management
and other market-development tools. Interland immediately moved up the
application stack, away from providing simply speeds and feeds to offering
Web design tools, which allowed customers to build their own Web sites or
have Interland do it for them. The packaging of Web site design software
and services was a new phase in the evolution of the industry. The
still-unmet goal was to transform all small and medium-sized businesses
into successful hosting customers.
Approximately 3 million, or 38 percent, of small businesses still lack an
Internet presence, according to statistics provided to Interland by IDC.
Of the 4.5 million small businesses with Web sites, 48 percent are looking
to upgrade within a year, and 78 percent say they aren't getting enough
leads from their Web sites.
The small business customers using site design software tools soon began
asking, "What's next?" It turns out a Web presence wasn't enough. Lacking
the expertise to successfully use their Web sites as adjuncts to their
brick and mortar businesses, small business customers began demanding more
from providers than just hosting and site design. They needed a range of
business solutions — help in maintaining the Web site, driving traffic to
it, managing leads and conducting e-commerce.
Those demands have led to another phase in the industry's evolution. And
that trend, according to industry experts, is expected to continue for the
next several years with growth even more robust than the early adopter
phase. The delivery of value-added services to help customers build their
businesses is the new differentiator among shared hosting providers. And
the bar will continue to rise, making it increasingly difficult for new
hosting entrants to offer higher-end services and applications.
Today, the sales pitch among shared hosts is no longer about hosting. It's
about solutions geared toward small business owners. It's all about
helping small businesses be more successful.
"This evolution of moving from core hosting to Web site design tools has
taken a couple of years," says Glenn Hofmann, Interland's vice president
of shared hosting services. "I predict the adoption of the next round of
tools — lead management, site traffic, and e-commerce — is going to be a
much quicker adoption phase.
"Over the next year, it's going to be pretty amazing how many people
really move into the site marketing, lead management and e-commerce
areas," Hofmann says. "It's going to be about those providers who have the
foresight to see this is where the market is going and those that have the
resources to make that move. If you don't have these business tools, it's
going to be very difficult to get small businesses interested in what you
have to offer."
Partnerships with software developers are likely to be a key component of
the next phase of selling services to the SMB market, making it more
difficult still for small players to compete with larger providers. But
the development of the "whole package" Web hosting offering has led to the
development of a whole new market among the companies, like Ensim (ensim.com)
and Alabanza (alabanza.com), that support smaller hosts, and have begun to
focus on delivering the means for smaller providers to include tools for
e-commerce and Web site marketing into their existing offerings.
IBM Introduces New POWER5
Servers
October 18, 2004
IBM (ibm.com)
announced last Friday that it has introduced three new POWER5
processor-based servers that the company says outpace Sun and HP products
in performance records and establish new standards for server
virtualization capabilities with the capability of running over 250
virtual servers on a single machine. The new systems include the IBM
eServer p5 595, eServer p5 590 and the eServer i5 595.
"With the introduction of these new eServer p5 systems, we are providing
record breaking performance and giving clients the means to consolidate
large Sun and HP server workloads," says Adalio Sanchez, general manager
of the IBM eServer pSeries. "The leadership price and performance gap we
have enjoyed for nearly three years has just widened to a chasm. Today, we
are establishing new economics for the server industry and delivering
unparalleled value for our clients."
The eServer p5 590 is available with 1.65GHz clock speed and can scale up
to as many as 32 processors. The flagship p5 595 is available with either
1.65GHz or 1.90GHz processors and can scale to a 64-way system.
IBM considers the eServer i5 system to be the ultimate solution server,
providing the broadest choice of applications available. Tens of thousands
of software applications are available for AIX 5L, i5/OS Windows and Linux
operating environments, all supported on the eServer i5 server.
"We are announcing another member of the eServer i5 family today - the
64-way eServer i5 595. This model is one of the world's most powerful
servers and provides our large enterprise iSeries clients with the
scalability they need to meet their growing business demands," says Mike
Borman, IBM eServer iSeries General Manager. "The eServer i5 family of
servers makes managing clients' IT environments simple, very secure and
reliable. We have integrated our world-class technology with the broadest
set of applications available on a single server making the eServer i5 the
ultimate solutions server."
IBM is set to release its newest POWER5 processor-based eServer systems on
November 19, 2004.
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