Making a Business of Service

by Tom Gilmore

March 13, 2002 —

Many IT initiatives popular in the late '90s were information
intensive, designed to capture the benefits of the emerging "next wave"
technologies. More than a few of the grand enterprise solutions, such
as ERP and CRM, have yet to realize their potential for those
enterprises with the scale to make such projects simultaneously
daunting and tempting.

End-to-end software solutions, aimed at harnessing the engine of the
Internet and knowledge-based technologies to gather and focus
information, were supposed to yield a competitive advantage for those
enterprises that could successfully deploy them. What these
technologies have in common are databases -- vast, heterogeneous,
numerous and expanding databases.

Serving up services that focus on these databases presents an excellent
opportunity for the right kind of provider. The needs and pain points
are tangible and aren't likely to diminish anytime in the near future,
if ever. One company that had an early handle on this area of service
provision is dbaDIRECT Inc.

dbaDIRECT Inc., headquartered in Cincinnati, Ohio, is a leading
provider of remote database administration (DBA) services. John
Bostick, president and CEO of dbaDIRECT recently told xSP trends that
dbaDIRECT was founded in 1999 to answer a need in the mid-systems
market for database administration skills and remote data base
administration. Today dbaDIRECT includes Fortune 500 enterprise clients
like Proctor & Gamble and Best Buy among its clientele.

Bostick told xSP trends that today, dbaDIRECT has experience and
expertise with over 25 varieties of database "flavors". The list
includes products from all the heavyweights: Oracle, Sybase, Informix,
MS SQL Server, and DB2. dbaDIRECT provides its clients with
maintenance, performance tuning, backup and recovery, and a full range
of reporting.

"It's not unusual for our clients to have multiple databases under
administration," said Bostick, "Administrators go on vacation carrying
2 pagers and a cell phone. Right now with our systems and technology we
have productivity rates twice those in the average corporate setting.
Our administrators comfortably manage 30 databases while corporate
administrators typically manage between five and ten."

dbaDIRECT has focused on the service element of service provisioning
and thus avoided the conflict over physical control of the database. By
utilizing the strengths of the Web-delivered services model and the
automation of the management process, dbaDIRECT delivers real-time
proactive management. This model promises to exceed the capabilities of
in-house database administrators who may have limited experience with
some databases under their care and may be forced to manage more
reactively.

Beyond maximizing the productivity of administrators, focusing
exclusively on database management carves out a business niche that can
lower a client's costs without requiring a massive capital investment
or the perceived loss of control that so many executives fear. By all
accounts, this should be a hard-to-beat formula.

ITworld