AS A PROVIDER of an application hosting service for Internet applications, Intira has created an infrastructure that companies such as Emerson Electric and Armstrong Tile use to run mission-critical applications. Accounting firm Deloitte & Touche is another fan; it bought a 10 percent stake in Intira last week. In an interview with InfoWorld Editor in Chief Michael Vizard, Intira CEO Bernie Schneider talks about what it will take to survive in this space as well as how he sees pricing models beginning to evolve.

InfoWorld: What does Intira focus on as its core competency?

Schneider: We are essentially outsourcing all of the infrastructure required to run applications. We build everything underneath the application -- the servers, the storage, security, and the network -- and we engineer, implement, operate, and manage all of that on an ongoing basis. Our focus is what we would call mission-critical applications, so we don't have shared servers, shared firewalls, or any of that type of stuff. We tend to attract those customers who feel very strongly that their applications can't go down.

InfoWorld: There's a lot of concern about the long-term profitability associated with companies in the Web-hosting space. What makes your approach different?

Schneider: We are private, and we've raised just a little under $400 million. Customers can't tell us to use this firewall or use that storage platform. We do all of that. They can pick the application software, but we're going to drive the platform. So we get a lot of scalability out of the people and some of the processes we put in place. And we're actually seeing the number of man-hours to implement applications come down quite a bit. The key thing in the typical Web hosting company is that most of their revenue is coming from bandwidth sales and floor-space sales. That has absolutely seen a lot of pricing pressure. I think our model looks more like IBM and EDS, but it's for people who need to move faster. We don't deal in the mainframe world.

InfoWorld: How do you see pricing models evolving?

Schneider: I see them moving toward the pay-as-you-go model. If you look out 18 months, 24 months, I think we can even get it down to a transaction basis, meaning for a certain level of application availability, say 99.95 percent, we're going to charge you a penny a transaction. The other thing that you're going to see is that we're working with software vendors so a customer can say they are going to use an Oracle database, IBM WebSphere, and these other packages, and then Oracle, IBM, or whoever can electronically bill the customer for the software.

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