In celebration of reaching its 300,000 registered sites milestone, free
corporate site purveyor Intranets.com
Tuesday served its clients a piece of memory cake.
Launched in August of 1999, the steadily growing firm gave its customers 5
megabytes of extra free space, affording each site a total of 30 megabytes
of online storage space, to show its appreciation.
The privately-held firm, one of the 50 or so offspring of the Bill
Gross-founded incubator idealab!,
also said it plans serious global expansion beyond its move into Japan
several months ago. Intranets.com is expanding internationally in part
because of the rapid growth of and demand for corporate sites overseas — to
date, more than 45,000 intranets have been created in Japan.
Because the firm is private, Rick Faulk, vice president of marketing for
Intranets.com, refused to discuss fiscal specifics with InternetNews.com
Tuesday, but said his company would be rolling out server farms in the
United Kingdom, Latin America and Australia over the next month to two
months.
Intranets.com has also landed some strategic aces on its home turf, in terms
of raising revenue. The outfit develops intranet solutions
for strategic partners such as Inc.com, Concentic Network Partners and Hello Direct.
Through these partnerships, Intranets.com allows partners to offer their
small business customers intranets featuring applications such as document
sharing, hosted e-mail, contact databases and group calendars — a strategy
that allows additional revenue streams to flow into the source company.
“We’re different from other businesses in that we roll out in two ways,”
Faulk said. “The first way is your traditional model of revenue —
advertising, e-mailing, etc. The second way is a value-added revenue share
model, in which about 100 partners participate.”
Faulk said his firm is especially attractive to telecommunications companies
and Internet service providers.
“Intranets.com has become an essential part of my business,” said Penny
Hussey, executive vice president and co-founder of
Romance Foretold, an electronic publisher of romance novels with 26 editors
and staff. “The intranet is as important as the phone.
Without an intranet, coordinating publishing schedules, exchanging important
documents and maintaining close contact with authors
would be nearly unmanageable.”
Significant, too, to Intranets.com’s success was a multi-million investment
technology firm Hitachi Ltd made several months ago.
Intranets.com’s brethren in idealab! include GoTo.com and NetZero.
