| By Allen Bernard
October 19, 2000
Hosted infrastructure provider Intira Corp. announced closing
a $140m second round of equity funding earlier this month
(Oct 9th).
The Pleasanton CA-based company calls itself a 'netsourcing'
solutions provider for ASPs, independent software vendors
and dot-com companies. Begun in 1998 as a digital broadcasting
network, the company has since morphed into its current position
as a backbone infrastructure provider. The company offers
managed network support for mission-critical e-business applications
through data centers and a proprietary broadband network offering
guaranteed quality-of-service (QoS) that reaches 35 major
North American metropolitan areas.
Since its inception in 1998, Intira has raised $385 million
(US) in debt and equity financing.
The company says it differs from competitors by offering
turn-key hosting solutions utilizing its own in-house IT personnel
and hardware. According to Intira, other hosting models simply
offer hardware in a 'caged' environment that requires client
ASPs to supply support personnel. This can be a very expensive
proposition for emerging ASPs. Because of this, the investment
community, always looking for the next hot market, is turning
to the hosting sector to invest its money.
"The investors are seeing this as a hot market," Lisa Copass,
Intira's director of public relations told ASPnews.com. "This
is the way the market is going."
The company's customers pay a premium for its services. According
to its own numbers, at an average monthly fee of $43,000,
Intira charges about double what its competition charges.
Multi-year contracts
For Pleasanton, CA-based MobileForce Technologies, a turnkey
ASP serving the telecommunications service industry, Intira's
prices did not deter it from signing a multi-year contract.
The company has recently embarked on an aggressive expansion
plan, and outsourcing its technology needs was key to its
growth, Tom Burke, MobileForce's VP of marketing and business
development told ASPnews.com.
"We're expanding and the quickest (way) ... is outsourcing,"
he said. "You couldn't do this yourself."
MobileForce also looked at Intira competitors Exodus and
Global Center, which recently announced a $6 billion merger.
"We did look at other industry leading co-location providers
and we just thought that Intira offered the best solution
for the money," Burke said.
Other Intira clients include international building products
supplier Armstrong World Industries, Habro dot-com subsidiary
Games.com, New Balance Athletic Shoe, and Myspace.com, an
online information management company with two million customers
worldwide.
This week (Oct 16th), Intira acquired a further ASP customer.
It announced a multi-year, $3.8 million contract with voice
technology company VocalPoint to provide the outsourced IT/network
infrastructure and resources for the vendor's new business-to-business
VoiceASP™ offering.
"VocalPoint's ASP solutions support mission-critical applications
in industries such as health care and financial services.
We needed a comprehensive, integrated IT/network infrastructure
that meets the stringent reliability requirements of a Fortune
1000 corporate data center — which is what we get with
Intira's solution," said Don Ursem, VP network operations,
VocalPoint.
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