Data Center Grows — continued

Business moving forward
The company is exploring other initiatives. It has just opened its first storefront in Rainier, Oregon, with a sales representative also offering service five days each week, Monday to Friday. Nuss says that the decision was made easy because the company has an employee with a positive reputation for sales and service in Rainier.

But the focus for the company remains adding products to its small business bundle. "Our core product offering is managed services," says Hulbert. "We manage everything for our customers, who are mainly small businesses and local enterprises."

The company's largest declared customers are Hollywood Entertainment, Outrigger Hotels & Resorts (in Hawaii), Flowerbud.com, and Inspiration Software.

The relationship with the web design firm helps in many ways. It drives clients to the internet offering, of course. But it also allows the data center to offer custom applications. Hulbert says opus:interactive runs Outrigger Hotels & Resorts' reservation engine. "We do everything for it, from running the servers in our data center to providing connectivity to Hawaii."

Nuss says that this sort of deal is becoming more commonplace as companies focus on their core competence and realize that mission critical applications "cannot be on a server that's under someone's desk or in a closet."

Customers are also becoming more comfortable with renting software, and software providers are also recognizing the need. Hulbert is particularly pleased with Microsoft's Service Provider Licensing Agreement (SPLA).

"Each month I report the number of licenses and pay a fixed fee for that," he says. "My customers can rent a software product that would cost them thousands of dollars, and change to the new version when it comes out (there is a charge for migration)."

Asked what control panels the company recommends, Hulbert says he recommends Helm for Windows and DirectAdmin for UNIX. "But the customer can use any control panel they want, cPanel, Plesk, Ensim, whatever."

Plans for the future
Going forward, the plan for the business is to add more services to the bundle, raising revenues per user (a plan we recommend to every ISP on the planet).

An obvious addition is VoIP. Hulbert says that while many companies are already offering VoIP, opus:interactive didn't want to be hasty. "We don't jump into a product. Our philosophy is that until we're ready to do it well and right, we won't. Internally, our core values say that we have to provide this at a certain level."

So the company is getting to know Asterisk by deploying it in its own offices. "We all have VoIP phones on our desk now. This conversation is happening on our business grade VoIP offering." The conversation was very very clear.

"With our development [parent company], opus:creative, we can offer customers help with .net programming or design a web front end for them, whatever they need. We can do just about everything except media buys."

After adding VoIP, the company may add wireless broadband.

"We're just at the dabbling stage with wireless," Nuss says. "Our business model is to fine tune the offering before we sell it. We've deployed several hotspots and have a wireless expert on staff who worked for a wireless provider in another state. We have wireless in our data center, too. But it's still in the R&D phase for us."

—End

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