[London, ENGLAND] Internet hosting company Conxion Corporation
announced Thursday the launch of hosting services in Europe.
Conxion will operate from data centers in London, Amsterdam and
Brussels, providing services similar to those it already
provides its U.S. customers such as Microsoft, Oracle, Symantec,
Seagate and Visa.
Conxion also said Thursday it is teaming up with “a major
European communications company” to provide hosting services
under a three-year agreement for the company’s corporate
customers.
However, Conxion has remained coy about revealing the
name of its customer, saying simply that the European
company will sell Conxion’s services via its worldwide
sales force — suggesting that it is a reasonably
substantial, possibly huge operation.
“We believe it’s important to launch our managed hosting
services in Europe with a respected partner that has
an established customer base of multinational corporations,”
said Antonio Salerno, Conxion’s founder and chief executive
officer.
Conxion’s offering is distinguished by its brave
FailSafe 99.999 percent uptime guarantee. If the
service fails for more than 30 seconds the customer
gets a free month of hosting.
At present, Conxion’s European network features dual
redundant connectivity between both London and Amsterdam
to its Tier-1 network in the United States. It plans
to add similar connectivity between its data centers in
Amsterdam, Brussels and London over the next year.
Conxion purchased network and data center infrastructure
from Versatel Telecom International in August 2000 and
has spent six months upgrading it to introduce managed
services.
An early European client is graphics arts house
StudioEU, hosted at the Amsterdam facility. For this
client Conxion will provide high-bandwidth services for
distributing digital photographs and other images to
graphic arts professionals around the world.
Researchers believe that managed hosting will grow
significantly in Europe over the next few years.
A recent study by IDC says it will grow from US $783
million in 2001 to over US $2.8 billion by the end of 2004.
Another report, to be released shortly by Ovum, entitled
“Web Hosting, Usage and Markets,” confirms the trend.
“Companies like Conxion are wise to try to grab market
share in this potentially lucrative growth market,” said
Christina Kasica, senior consultant at Ovum and lead
author of the report.
With growth, however, comes competition. Telecom operators,
software companies, ISPs and other companies are offering
hosting services in Europe — and many of them will wish
to add value to their offerings by adding full managed
services.
