In its drive to reap revenues by cashing in on companies outsourcing their web management, PSINet Inc yesterday announced plans to expand its data centers in the US and set up new facilities across Europe and North America. As part of the announcement, the internet service provider has signed an exclusive deal with Hewlett Packard Co to supply a range of high- end UNIX 9000 servers, Windows NT boxes and Open View management software, which it will use to offer a new range of web-hosting services based on HP’s Enterprise Mission Critical and Web QoS technologies. The latter are designed to guarantee quality of service at the server level, as opposed to the network level, although earlier this year (CI, No 3408) HP and Cisco, with its equivalent CiscoAssure policy, announced an alliance to ensure their initiatives would be compatible. Michael Mael, PSINet’s vice president for applications and web services, said the new outsourcing services – an all-encompassing term which covers connectivity, content, load balancing and management of Web servers – were designed for companies wanting to aggressively expand their internet trade. He added, It will allow companies to scale their web presence from on-line brochures to mission- critical application support. The internet used to be thought of as a toy, but now companies are fast realizing it’s a complete data solution. The two companies said they expected the bulk of their business to come from the, as yet untapped, middle market: those organizations that rank just below the Fortune 500 group. While most of the companies will initially want to set up ‘store front’, e-commerce-style applications, Mael said it wouldn’t be long before businesses started to move their more critical applications, like Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software, to Web hosting services as well. PSINet is following a trend among telcos and other service providers, all of whom are rushing to push out additional, outsourced services to balance falling data transmission revenues. Robert Offley, sales and marketing director at PSINet UK Ltd, told ComputerWire the company hopes to see outsourcing make up 50% of its revenues within the next two years, up from a current level of 30%. PSINet already has data centers in the US, and plans to build new ones in key access points in Europe, starting with London in the fourth quarter of this year and Amsterdam. The company will also add a data center in Toronto, Canada. The ISP, which launched a subsidiary dedicated to telecoms, PSINet Telecom Ltd, in February, has started trials of voice over IP services for corporate users, but did not say when it plans to offer full voice services.
