'Refreshing' Web Hosting with StratoGen

Karl Robinson, Managing Director of StratoGen discusses how strong customer engagement separates his company from the pack.

TH: What is the chief distinguishing factor in your Web hosting operation that separates it from the competition?

KR: Our customer engagement - we excel at every touch point, from initial sales enquiry whether it be via our online or traditional channels, through to inlife customer service and technical support. Our clients constantly give us unprompted positive feedback about how refreshing it is to deal with a company that knows what they are talking about.

TH: What are the Top 3 elements of your Web hosting company that your customers are most impressed with?

KR: Number 1- Our website: our customers always compliment us on the clarity of our offering and the ease of navigation

2. Our SHARP offering - customers are constantly amazed by how much they can save over traditional hosting costs when switching to our VMware hosted resource pool offering. SHARP 'productises' VMware's resource pool containers allowing customers to get close to a utility billing 'pay for what you use' model but with a predictable fixed monthly cost. Customers can oversubscribe resources in their pool, allowing multiple virtual machines to share RAM, storage and CPU offering real economies through ultra efficient cloud computing.

3. Our deployment times - customers simply can’t believe it when we get their complex IT environments up & running within minutes or hours

TH: If you could change one thing about your Web hosting business what would it be?

KR: We wouldn't change a thing. We have a hand-picked team, offering a choice portfolio of services that we all know and love. It's a great mix which is working well for us, so why change it?

TH: What products/services are most in demand now at StratoGen? What new products or services are currently in development and when do you plan to launch them?

KR: VMware Hosting and SHARP (StratoGen Hosting Advanced Resource Pool) are the current hot sellers. Our customers love the fact that they can trial both of these services free for 15 days - they get to use our platform in anger before signing on the dotted line, which gives them real confidence in our offering. Customers are benefiting from a true enterprise IT infrastructure - HP Blades, EqualLogic Storage, VMware, Tier 3 datacentres - and all for a modest monthly fee.

In development we have enhancements to the VMware platform to increase automation and enable better self-servicing for clients that demand it, which we hope to launch before the end of the year.

TH: You've mentioned that SaaS Hosting is one of the leading trends in the industry right now. What are StratoGen's keys to success in this segment? What other trends do you see emerging in the near future and how will StratoGen address those market opportunities?

KR: The key to success in SaaS hosting is for ISVs to be able to start small, thus minimising their startup costs when moving to a SaaS model, and then be able to scale their hosting platform in line with customer numbers and demand as their SaaS offering becomes a success. Smaller ISV's simply can't justify massive upfront investment to SaaS enable their software.

In terms of other trends, we're already starting to see entire back offices moving to the cloud - before long all SMEs will realise that they never need to buy servers or software again.