Interviewed on 26 Jan 09
Stephen Dendtler , Channel Partner Manager
Being a managed hosting services company since 1999, the team behind RackCorp.com know what it takes to deliver high-quality, robust, SLA-driven hosting environments. With a background in providing network connectivity and outsourced server hosting to the enterprise / research / government sectors in both Australia and the US, RackCorp has built up a massive network of high-availability hosting services.
With a primary business in providing managed hosted services, RackCorp's support team has grown into a very capable group able to support enterprise grade hardware like SANs and firewalls, databases like Oracle and SQL Server, and operating systems like Windows 2008, Linux, FreeBSD, and SunOS. With this background in delivering infrastructure services, RackCorp has been able to constantly deliver on it's 99.9% uptime services guarantee.
RackCorp's online portal includes a full set of service control profiles, and service / statistics information. Resellers are particularly catered for with RackCorp. With a fully rebrandable service portal, optional transparent 24x7 ticket support, and full SOAP API's for doing absolutely everything associated with hosted services, there's hardly a better partner for a global business looking for an infrastructure partner - RackCorp simply delivers.
What unique selling points do you offer?
Our staff are definitely what sets us apart. Because of our large number of long term service contracts, we have full-time in-house skilled resources in so many areas that other hosting companies usually sub-contract out. Our ability to quickly resolve complex issues due to having specialists working for us has often been the source of acclaim from our customers.
Describe the services you offer?
Web hosting to us is providing the technology / infrastructure to keep online services up and running. For many 'hosting companies', online services are just web sites. For us, online services include everything from airline passenger booking intra/extranets, freight location tracking systems, shared scientific archives featuring hundreds of terabytes of data and yes even Joe's online shop for second hand dog collars is a valuable online service in our eyes too.
Describe your target market?
The SaaS provider market is definitely our current target base, both historically and into the future. While we ourselves tend not to be the SaaS provider, in some cases we find that being the technology provider for such providers pushes our infrastructure really hard, and forces us to constantly adapt new technologies to allow these providers to meet their commitments. We have a lot of respect for just how far SaaS technologies have pushed this company. In that respect we love SaaS providers and they love us.
How is your company planning for the future?
If there's one thing that last year proved to all hosting providers, it was that hosted services is no longer the outsourced domain of large corporates. We've seen over the past few years that small businesses have been more willing to push all of their infrastructure on to third-party providers. We've had to change our business model slightly to accommodate for this new kind of end-user, but we've done so with the expectation that this market is going to continue to grow. In making this adaption we have planned that RackCorp will over the next few years end up providing more end-user services on top of our core infrastructure which will one day take over as being our core revenue.
What benefits can you offer your customers?
RackCorp has grown in no short part due to the backing by our channel partners who include hardware vendors, system integrators, and also web developers. They're the ones who have helped us get to where we are today, so we have great respect and wherever possible have sought to give them the tools to better promote their businesses. Choosing RackCorp as a service provider isn't about choosing a webhoster, it really is about choosing a partner who has the infrastructure, the policies, the procedures, and the financial backing to really give your company a solid standing in the market.
How do you support your customers?
Firstly, it has to be said that RackCorp has staff controlling our systems 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. Our main office is located in Sydney, Australia and is where all of our systems are monitored and controlled from. We're not a virtual company like so many others out there - our support guys work directly for us, our offices are leased by us, we're real.
Our primary support method is 24x7 ticket support, and is offered to all of our customers. Our typical answer times are between 2 and 15 minutes on critical tickets. To the best of my knowledge, we've never had a critical ticket not get looked into within 15 minutes of submission. Customers are also free to give us a ring and we'll either answer them, call them back, or submit a ticket on their behalf. All issues are logged as online tickets however, and are handled in order of priority and submission time.
For our channel partners, we love feedback. I personally get to speak with many of them either on the phone or at our quarterly synergy lunches where we get to discuss RackCorp, the hosted services industry, and often get some real synergy between our partners happening.
