Lance Crosby sees Web hosting becoming a true utility service in the near future and tells us why SoftLayer is poised to become the “electric company.”

TH: You’ve said: “In these tough economic times our solutions are more relevant than ever…” Why specifically are SoftLayer’s hosting services more relevant in this economic climate?

LC: Companies are looking to conserve cash as credit is becoming harder to get, which is causing outsourcing to be on the rise. We are seeing companies tightening their belts and looking more towards business models that don’t require heavy capital expenditure.

We have invested tens of millions of dollars in technology and infrastructure to support our model and to optimize the delivery of technology to customers, thus, enabling solutions that are generally only available to large enterprises that can afford the investment. Examples of this include our security products from TippingPoint and the network storage infrastructure from Dell Equallogic.

TH: We’ve not spoken before, and I’m curious about the formation of the company and the split from The Planet. Please give us a synopsis.

LC: SoftLayer was established in 2005 to deliver next generation webhosting and on-demand datacenter services to customers on a global basis from facilities in Dallas TX and Seattle WA. Utilizing proprietary management tools, coupled with the industry's first network-within-a-network topology, the company delivers unprecedented power and control to securely manage IT environments while providing unparalleled scalability.

Our view of hosting is that computing will become a true utility service in the coming years and our goal is to become the electric company. All of the products and services that SoftLayer brings to market are part of that core belief, including the new line of CloudLayer services.

TH: Tell us why you think cloud computing dominates the talk in the industry right now? What SoftLayer products in the virtualization stream and cloud computing realm are you most excited about?

LC: Cloud computing provides the flexible, on-demand model that many companies are looking for. Businesses increasingly are looking for technology solutions that provide scalable computing power that efficiently adapts to meet computing needs in real-time. Cloud computing provides a balance between massively scalable computing power and a pay-as-you-go pricing model, so companies aren’t saddled with unaffordable capital expenditure.

At the same time, many customers will want a fully integrated solution that combines the scalability of cloud, the flexibility of virtualization, and the performance of dedicated. SoftLayer is the only hosting company to fully integrated cloud computing, virtualization, and dedicated servers and deliver them as a unified set of products and capabilities. Our CloudLayer™ suite of services is available as stand-alone products, but they can also integrate and be managed alongside of dedicated servers. That’s what we see as the future for cloud.

TH: Coming off an extremely good year in 2008 including revenues, profits and customer wins, so far how has the company performed in 2009? What major developments are in store for the remainder of the year?

LC: SoftLayer has continued to see strong growth in 2009. With the recent addition of our CloudLayer™ suite of services we anticipate seeing new customer wins in various market segments. Going forward, the most difficult part will be continuing to innovate and automate key features and functionality ahead of customer demand. In the coming months we have a number of new features and services planned, including:

• CDN Enhancements
• Image Management
• Storage Network
• WAN Acceleration
• Content Caching and SSL Acceleration
• Advanced Monitoring
• API Enhancements
• WebTop / PDA Control Panels
• Data Mining
• Managed Colocation