hostingcon 2007

"HostingCon Quotables"

“It’s our first show and we’re getting lots of traffic. It’s always important to get your name out there and we’re doing that.”
-Rob Moore, President of DemoWolf

“We’re gaining leads. There are many hosting companies that want to free up resources and use our tech support services.”
-Aji Abraham, VP Business Devt., SupportPro

“Business is going well. Ideally we’d like to walk out of here with 15 to 20 resellers. It’s possible… if you look around some of our competitors aren’t here.”
-Steve Eshweiler, HiVelocity Hosting

“Our business does well on word of mouth referrals. But some hosts don’t want to share the fact they use us because of the competitive advantage. That’s why we’re here.”
-George Wang, President Lite Speed Technologies
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HostingCon 2007 Highlights

Keynote: The Future of Service Enablement

Moderated by David Snead, the session featured four panelists with differing views from what service enablement actually was to how Web hosts should differentiate themselves in today’s market. That’s a theme that echoes in Web hosting circles to this day and this event in particular.

Lou Honick , CEO of HostMySite, said any service delivery model has to incorporate how to provide services to your customer. He’s right. No one disagreed with that. Serguei Beloussov, SWSOFT’s Chief executive said, “service enablement is a fancy word “that hosters really don’t identify with, and the key to the future was understanding technology and automation in particular. David Koston , of cPanel, looks at service enablement from the multi-strategy approach ,which like Honick’s take , involves services to your company and your customers.

Sean Richards of Touch Support includes the concept of production of applications to become better at technology as it evolves into the future –obviously more in line with Beloussov’s assessment.

As far as how Web hosts need to decide what services to offer, Beloussov hit the nail on the head by identifying 3 things:
  1. Product Management: it is essential to establish what your customers need.
  2. Product Marketing: you must identify the advantages before marketing to your customers
  3. Proactive Sales Activity: you absolutely must communicate with your customer
All panelists were bullish on SaaS while three of the four were moderately bullish on Virtualization and Grid Hosting. Honick said that it’s important to start building competency in these areas but that they were not necessarily ready for prime time-a note that seemed to resonate with the attendees.

HostingCon Business Networking Cruise

Ideally the measure of success on a Business Networking Cruise (so I’m told) is that companies need to get more deals than the drinks consumed. We’ll say TopHosts.com and FastServers.net, the sponsors of the most successful event at HostingCon this year, didn’t live up to that ideal. But on the fun scale this cruise was 10/10. Everyone in attendance, about 380 with huge smiles and plenty of gratitude, will concur. Have a look at the pictures!

TopHosts Spy Camera

Stay tuned for more photos!