USDataCenters Inc., a Marlborough, Mass., a provider of managed Web- and data-hosting services, has landed $10 million in venture capital to expand its facility.
The funding boosts the total venture backing for USDataCenters, founded in 1996, to $17 million.
Contributors to the latest round include previous backers BancBoston Capital and Housatonic Partners, along with cable entrepreneur Robert Fanch and Ray Anton.
Faced with the need to store and access large amonts of data, Internet and other businesses are farming out their hosting needs to companies like USDataCenters, which runs a secure, 25,000 square-foot data center. The company goes beyond simple “co-location” of a company’s servers, also providing full IT management, CEO Steve Tritman said.
“There are some companies that are (storage) selling space — co-location,” Tritman said. Among them: telco giants Level 3, AT&T, MCI, Sprint and Exodus Communications. Some, such as Exodus, go further and also provide monitoring of the systems for clients, he said.
“We take it the next step, and actually manage the site for them,” Tritman said. “It’s really like the customer being able to outsource their IT department.”
Among its clients are Kraft
Group, Sonesta International Hotels, Circle.com, the New England
Patriots and USJobs.com.
The new funding will go toward expanding its infrastructure and to add staffers in sales and marketing. The company currently employs about 70 people in all departments.
Among the top-level hires in recent months are two technical executives from portal Lycos and a marketing executive from competitor HarvardNet, which started focusing on Web hosting when it dropped its DSL service several months ago. The hires include Ron Rainville, Lycos’ former director of operations and Jason Heyd, Lycos’ former chief operations architect.
Among its plans for growth is building a second data center, this one outside of New England, Tritman said.
