Redbus Investments, the investment house set up by Cliff Sanford, the founder of the UK internet service provider, Demon Internet Ltd is to launch a four million pound venture which will offer one-stop facilities housing services to telecommunications provider, ISPs and internet companies.
The concept behind the venture is to bring all the key players in the internet and e-commerce arena as close together as possible, explains James Gardiner, deputy managing director of Redbus. Gardiner says that this will make choosing providers easy for ISPs and choosing ISPs easy for virtual companies. If an ISP decides it wants to change providers we’ll just need to plug them into a new socket, says Gardiner, and that will mean charging them a fraction of what other facilities houses would.
Gardiner claims Redbus’ building is much better designed than other facilities: We’ve paid careful attention to location, layout and planning, he says, from security, safety and office comfort to housing space and power supply. The facility will be run as a separate company, Redbus Interhouse Limited, and will employ 20 staff – 90% of whom will be engineers – providing a 24-hour service, seven days a week.
Redbus has already attracted eight major telecoms providers to the site, including British Telecommunications, Colt, Energis and Cable & Wireless. There are no ISPs at the facility yet, but Gardiner thinks this will not be a problem simply because of the large number of them. The services will go live on June 2.
The venture is Redbus’ first technology investment since its inception last May. The investment company was started by the founder of Demon Systems, Cliff Stanford, after he sold the then six year old internet company to Scottish Telecom for 66m pounds, also in May last year. Stanford set up Redbus with the intention of providing venture capital funding for UK start-ups. The company has already invested in two British film companies. Stanford says Redbus will be announcing five further investments, three or four of which will be technology companies, in the next two months.
