Anoosh Manzoori: managing director SmartyHost
Andrew Spicer: CEO of WebCentral
Spicer
You got some negative responses from the blogging community following the results of your recent SmartyBlog competition. Will you be running the competition again, and if so, will you do anything differently?
Manzoori
Looking back I must say that having had a chance to be part of arranging the 2005 SmartyBlog Awards was one of my most rewarding experiences of the year. The huge amount of positive feedback from the Australian and international blog community has definitely convinced us to commit to running the awards in 2006 and beyond.
The SmartyBlog Awards attracted more than 25,000 unique visitors to the registration page during the 12 days the registration period lasted. Similar to how everyone can’t agree with the winners of the Oscars, any competition based on subjective opinion will always have controversial results. Based on the feedback from opinion leaders within the Australian blog community, we see that the criteria put before the independent five-member panel could be tightened to better reflect the nature of blogging in Australia.
We’ll always be working to ensure that the competition reflects the realities of Australian blogging and so in 2006 we will extend the criteria—in response to feedback—to include, for example, RSS-feeds and the extent to which a blog has been able to build up a community and following.
Manzoori
When do you expect to see market consolidation in the shared Web-hosting industry? Who will be the survivors?
Spicer
We expect to see market consolidation in the Web-hosting industry over the coming 12 to 18 months, driven by strong growth in business-critical applications and Web sites.
For example, a few years ago small to medium enterprises (SMEs) were not as concerned about the reliability of their Web sites because they were typically brochure-style sites and not transactional. These days SMEs are generating significant business and revenue online, so reliability and uptime are key. With this in mind, we suspect that smaller hosting providers will struggle to maintain the redundant infrastructure, systems and 24x7 service customers are demanding of the host of their business-critical applications and Web sites.
We have recently seen an increased number of smaller hosts approach us offering to sell their customer bases, with the main reason being that it is becoming more and more difficult to provide the reliability, breadth of products and security that business customers of all sizes now demand.
We continuously invest in maintaining and upgrading our technical platforms, data centre facilities and systems. For example, security has become such a key factor in the Internet industry that we have employed a dedicated team to monitor and manage our customers’ data security. We are also currently implementing ITIL best practice guidelines across our data centres. We are confident that established trusted providers with proven experience, reliable infrastructure and responsive service, will be the survivors.
Spicer
What do you predict will be the "next big thing" for the Internet industry?
Manzoori
I’m not convinced that there can be one "next big thing" for an industry as complex as the Internet industry but my general prediction is that multimedia applications will increase drastically. With broadband becoming commonplace the market will open up considerably and the bottleneck of data at the user’s end should be opened by the end of this decade. As a result we’ll see an explosion of services such as Internet TV, video streamed blogs an dd vertical entertainment portals. The Internet will transform from simple text and pictures to a fully fletched multimedia forum, and digital home convergence technology will give it a new presence in places we previously thought weren’t possible.
Manzoori
Do you feel management and set-up fees for Australian SMEs are fair with the array of automatic set-up and management tools available to the industry?
Spicer
We believe it is only fair to charge a set-up fee for products that require additional administration and customer support upfront, such as re-delegation of domain names, assistance with e-mail and FTP (file transfer protocol) set up.
We do not charge a set-up fee on our products that are purely auto-provisioned, including Managed Exchange premium e-mail, Promotions Manager, SpamDefend, Web Forums and Streaming Media.
Spicer
How frequently do you refresh your hosting platform to cater to new technologies such as .NET2 and Cold Fusion MX7?
Manzoori
Because it is so important to us to ensure we can cater for the needs of any Australian business we traditionally launch new features every two to three months.
As a result of using open source as our backbone it is easy for us to offer the latest technology. During the second half of 2005 we launched Australia’s first corporate blogging tool, several new e-commerce tools, advanced Web site statistics tools and so on. As we are introducing a range of specialised hosting services during the first half of 2006, the latest versions of .NET and ColdFusion will be added.
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