Verio CEO Justin Jaschke recently spoke about Verio's plans with Network World Senior Writer Jennifer Mears.

How has the merger with NTT gone?

Combining and building a global operation is never easy, but the companies are working extremely well together. We've taken some significant steps forward recently with global contracts we've signed for additional network capacity, which we put in place in the U.S., Asia and Europe.

We're working on a number of global products, such as global collocation services that will allow us to provide collocation services in Asia to our U.S. customer base in Tokyo, Singapore, Hong Kong and Australia, leveraging data centers that NTT has in those areas. And vice versa, they'll be able to provide global collocation services to their customers, leveraging our data centers in the U.S. and Europe. We've got trials going for global IP VPN services.

What can customers expect as far as changes with this merger?

As we bring online the OC-48 capacity and extend our backbone overseas in both directions, you'll see improved levels of speed, performance and reliability on the network. The data centers, as we bring them up, will allow customers to locate in more places and [use] advanced services as we roll out additional managed services within those data centers. And then a whole overlay of global services, focusing first on collocation, where they'll have access to these data centers on a global basis.

What managed services will Verio be rolling out?

Data backup and retrieval, advanced security services, managed security capabilities, caching and clustering capabilities in the server environment, application support either through partners or directly, applications such as the Oracle 8i database that are available in a hosted environment [customers] can leverage at a fraction of the cost of what it would cost them to buy. So a whole host of things that drive more and more toward providing this complete IT environment for customers to locate their applications.

You had a problem with an outage this past summer. What is Verio doing to prevent a repeat?

I'm not sure I'd characterize it as a big outage problem. We did have some outages that were due to some [telephone company] cuts, and what we have done in general is put in as much redundancy as possible. This was a case where we had brought up a data center without having the second telco link delivered due to time-to-market reasons and unfortunately got caught in that window between the delivery of the redundant telco and the fiber cut.

In general, we have dual, at least dual, and generally three separate telco providers coming in separate entrances. We have multiple back-up systems for power. And on the network, dual routers and so forth.

In the past, Verio has focused more on small and midsize companies. Where is the focus now?

I would say we are moving up-market. Clearly, we want to extend our reach up into serving the global multinational customers and enterprise market and that's one of the benefits of the kind of capital that's allowiing us to put very significant capacity online. We're rolling out an OC-48 kind of capacity on the network, which allows us to sell much bigger bandwidth to bigger customers, and the global reach allows us to serve multinationals.

Last year Verio had a plan to upgrade its network with Cisco gear. How's that progressing?

We've always had Cisco switches in our backbone. It's been a constant race between the speed and capacity requirements of the network and the capacity available that the switches can handle. So yes, we moved to a new generation of switches last year. We've got Juniper and Cisco switches in our network now. And we'll continue to move to the next generation, as those become available.

Do you see Verio partnering with more application service providers?

Yes, our vision for the company is to be a global platform services provider for content and applications. We can distribute those over our global backbone. Our relationship with Agilera is a great example of where we're providing infrastructure, the platforms, which they can host their applications on and provide worldwide reach over our backbone. We think more and more, that's where the world is going, where hosting is moving.

You talked about caching. Is content delivery also an area of focus?

Yes, and that's one of the advantages of a global, seamless network with access to databases on a worldwide basis. We have many different spots around the world where we can cache content for customers to help make it accessible more quickly to their end users, closer to the customer. . . . We do some of it internally through capabilities we've developed, and we partner with people like Inktomi, Akamai and others to do other forms of it.

Do you see consolidation happening among Web hosting companies?

It's going to shake out to the bigger, better-funded companies that have the scale and capacity to compete on a global basis.

» posted by ITworld staff

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