February 26, 2004 - BroadSpire (broadspire.com) is unique as a unique hosting company because it provides small and mid-sized businesses with enterprise-class services. The Los Angeles area service provider delivers outsourced IT; data center outsourcing; and fully managed Web hosting services.
"Our mantra is that we offer enterprise hosting for every business," says Suresh Srinivasan, BroadSpire's CEO. "What that means is that while we serve large organizations and small to mid-size businesses alike, we provide SMEs with the full benefit of our enterprise experience and expertise - without losing the human touch, the responsiveness and the accountability that are often hard to find in larger hosting providers."
The company is able to provide smaller businesses with enterprise-class services due to the infrastructure it has put in place. BroadSpire implemented an IT architecture that allows customers to scale their services based on demand. The company can allow for multiple upstream network providers, with more than 80 percent headroom across the network to handle sudden increases in traffic; and content backups that increase in terms of frequency and type. The firm can also immediately deploy services such as firewalls and load balancers on a "pay as you need" basis. In effect, these options allow small businesses to grow their e-business operations demand increases in real-time.
This is important for small businesses, as e-business models can transform from small to large operations in very short order. BroadSpire recently accommodated the growth of such a company, Brighthand.com (brighthand.com), one of the most popular places to learn about and discuss handheld computing. Brighthand.com has been cited in such leading publications as Investors Business Daily, San Jose Mercury News, Newsday, San Francisco Chronicle, Dow Jones Newswire and SmartMoney magazine.
When Brighthand.com outgrew its initial provider three years ago, the company conducted a thorough search, seeking a hosting firm that was financially secured, reliable, and responsive. At the same time, Brighthand demanded a provider that could deliver uptime, daily backups and redundancy 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.
After receiving bids from various hosting companies, Brighthand.com selected BroadSpire to accommodate its exponential growth. Brighthand's Web site was dynamically escalated from a shared hosting environment to a multi-server deployment in the space of a few months. The migration to a more sophisticated platform allowed the site to scale from one million page views a month to more than 10 million page views. The transition also allowed the Web site to accommodate user forums with more than 1.5 million participants.
"Transition was possible because BroadSpire put together a migration path in which we utilized our existing infrastructure to scale them up," states Srinivasan. "We were able to shift the site from shared to dedicated to multi-server within six to eight months."
BroadSpire was able to achieve this due to the sophisticated managed hosting services it has developed. The firm offers small and mid-sized companies a single source from which to deploy business critical applications that require high performance, guaranteed uptime, expert management, and state-of-the-art security on a cutting-edge technology and hardware platform. The architecture is quite well developed because Srinivasan previously built Internet gaming servers for one of Vivendi/Universal's entertainment divisions.
He started the business in conjunction with family to provide new, emerging, high-grade commercial Internet services to larger corporations in the late 1990s. The focus of the business now however is to tap an untapped marketplace. BroadSpire's goal is bring fully enterprise-class managed hosting services to smaller organizations.
"If you have mission critical applications such as an e-commerce operation, it behooves you to find the best managed hosting provider that can accommodate your rising supply and demand for your business at a cost-effective rate," states Srinivasan. "We feel that BroadSpire can accomplish that task, with a dual focus on cost efficiency and customer satisfaction."
The company currently provides enterprise-class services to over 2,000 customers in 35 countries, including Wells Fargo, Kmart and Paramount Pictures.
About the Author Rawlson O'Neil King is a contributing editor and analyst at the Web Host Industry Review. Before joining theWHIR, Mr. King was Director of Corporate Communications at WebHosting.Com. During his tenure there he established ineedsupport.com, the first branded destination customer care site in the shared hosting industry. He has prior experience as an IT consultant who served non-profit organizations, government and private industry. He holds a Bachelor of Journalism degree from Carleton University.
