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August 16, 1999

Network Pressure

continued...page 5 of 5

Illustration by August Stein

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"We're not a technology company, we're a marketing company," says Steve Furst, CEO of NetGift Registry Inc. In June, the Durham, N.C., company launched an online gift-registry service that connects customers to more than 500 retail and charitable organizations. The site can handle 1.5 million members and 1,500 concurrent users.

NetGift signed a three-year, $2 million contract with USinternetworking that lets the service provider take responsibility for systems hardware and the applications and databases running on six Sun Solaris servers and EMC storage systems deployed in Annapolis, Md., and Milpitas, Calif. "This is the type of agreement that enables us to say there is no finger-pointing here," Furst says.

One of the key advantages offered by service providers is experience--both good and bad. "They've been burned, they've had bad experiences, and they've learned from those things," says Dermot Pope, systems development manager for Talpx Inc., which created a lumber-exchange site for the $50 billion softwood, lumber, and paneling industry.

The Chicago company's site uses a Web front end to bring together buyers and sellers and generate purchase orders, invoices, and payments. But the company ran into problems getting its Web front end to communicate with its database during the final phases of implementation. UUnet, Talpx's service provider, brought in engineers who described similar problems other customers had experienced. That information provided clues for Pope to find a solution. "They were doing more than fulfilling a contract," says David Adams, vice chairman of the lumber exchange. "They worked with us."

UUnet also manages Talpx's 10 servers, which are connected by 100-Mbps Fast Ethernet links, its fault-tolerant infrastructure and load-balancing software, and its PeopleSoft application. Pope likes the round-the-clock support provided by an outsourcer. "I don't want a million-dollar machine room sitting in our Chicago offices," he says. "I want somebody watching those machines."

The Right Provider
While outsourcing can relieve many of the headaches involved in running an E-commerce site, the key is finding the right service provider. BidCom Inc., which provides an online application for managing major construction projects, says it once employed a carrier--which it would not identify--that was down 10% of the time and lost packets of customer information. "They didn't see it as a big issue, and they wouldn't elevate it," says Sal Chavez, co-founder and executive VP of the company.

When BidCom started to provide more services on its site, including the ability to buy materials, it turned to the Web-hosting service offered by Digital Island. In addition to hosting and managing BidCom's commerce site and data center, Digital Island helps the company's clients if they are having trouble accessing the site. Digital Island can also provide detailed reports on who is accessing the site.

A bad service provider can be costly, says Todd Walrath, senior VP of online services for Weather.com, the Weather Channel's Web site and one of the top-20 revenue-generating sites. Walrath says his previous hosting service didn't focus enough on uptime, so he switched to Exodus.

"Exodus' entire company is organized to design better Internet connectivity and service to their hosting customers," he says. Exodus offers a Java tool that lets site managers view the status of their servers from any Web browser. Exodus also provides a caching service that can duplicate content on servers in different regions, improving response time for a widely scattered group of users.

Exodus provides the Weather Channel with two to three times more capacity than it needs on an average day, and can easily add more. The Weather Channel has about 6 million page views a day, but expects 30 million to 40 million views when hurricanes start hitting in the next few weeks. Says Walrath, "As more people get on the Web, the price of being down for a day or even for a minute is becoming a really big deal."

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