Louisiana appears to have a technology market, after all.
Solid Systems barely got the doors open on its data center at the Louisiana Technology Park before its first three customers came bustling in.
A pair of New Orleans-based companies, Diamond Data Systems and Syndistar, and a Baton Rouge business, I T Group, have entrusted management of their servers and data to Solid Systems, signing on less than a month after the data center went live.
That is a sign of the kind of market Solid Systems believed it might find when the company chose to locate in Baton Rouge, said Diana Massaro, vice president of marketing.
"We have been very happy at the interest that we've gotten in Louisiana," she said. "I think there was an untapped need there."
The need that Solid Systems sees is for the outsourcing of information technology, specifically dealing with managed services for clients' servers. Managed services include data storage and backup, monitoring, security, disaster recovery, and systems and database administration.
Solid Systems offers a range of services, from simply housing a client's servers and ensuring 24-hour power and Internet connectivity to complete management of client systems.
"We can do as little or as much as customers want," Massaro said.
Clients can scale up from the most basic services as their needs increase, she said. "All businesses can benefit from the merits of what we offer," Massaro added. "They can concentrate on what they're supposed to be doing--working with their business."
That was an idea I T Group had well before Solid Systems came into town, said Emile Poche, vice president in charge of consulting for I T Group.
I T Group's business is document management and imaging services for government and business clients, and the company wanted to keep its IT people focused on that mission, not care and feeding of servers, Poche said.
Shipping the servers over to Solid Systems' facility should take care of those worries, he said. "They are a support service. It's something they can do well, something I don't want to spend my time doing."
The shift to the data center may also open up new business for I T Group, because the company will have the capability to act as a remote host for software it provides for clients, he said.
I T Group can provide the software and implementation services customers need for document and records management, but currently, clients manage those applications in-house, Poche said. If clients want to outsource management of those applications, I T Group's data center presence would now make that an option.
While I T Group had just been thinking seriously about the data center option, Diamond Data Systems president Joey Auer had decided data centers were the way to go, but almost did not bring his business to Baton Rouge.
"We actually almost sent all our hardware to Houston" Auer said. "We were about to sign on the dotted line with Sprint." Auer met with Solid Systems, toured the Baton Rouge site and immediately changed his plans when he saw the Bon Carre facility.
"I was just numb when I left," he said.
Diamond Data's business is IT consulting, but only a portion of its system will be housed in the data center Auer said.
Diamond Data's subsidiary, E-commerce Service Providers, however, will be contracting with Solid Systems to host all of its servers.
ESP's business model is to provide all aspects of e-commerce services for clients, Auer said. "We actually run the whole e-show for customers."
The company handles Internet marketing and promotions, as well as the electronic transactions. Clients need no more than a dial-up Internet connection, and ESP gives them all the tools they need to process orders, Auer said. "We do it in exchange for a sales commission."
ESP already has some big-name clients, including Penn State University, the University of Miami, and local high-profile companies Tony Chachere's and Cajun Injectors.
Syndistar is also using Solid Systems as a base for the servers of its subsidiary companies.
Syndistar's core business is distribution of educational videos, print materials and software, but its two subsidiaries, VideoRelay.com and e-biz.com, are strictly Internet plays, said Greg Fox, Syndistar vice president.
"VideoRelay is essentially a provider of Internet streaming media, video and audio, live and on-demand," he said.
The focus market is small to medium-size businesses interested in being able to use the Internet for events such as CEO addresses or product demonstrations, Fox said.
The company already has relationships with some big-name business players, including General Mills, Ericsson and Bayer. Ericsson, for instance, uses VideoRelay to stream video from convention booths.
Syndistar's other subsidiary, e-biz, is a start-up aimed at getting a piece of the e-commerce outsourcing market, Fox said. The e-biz model will include Web hosting, customer processing and secure certifications for credit card purchases.
Syndistar had made use of data center services before Solid Systems came along, contracting with a UU-Net center in Virginia, Fox said.
"The reason we went to Solid is we have what amounts to a world-class data center in our back yard," he said.
Solid Systems' Baton Rouge site has the necessary bandwidth, or ability to handle data transmission quickly, and is much more flexible in solving problems for clients than other centers, Fox said.
A second round of customers has already committed to contracting with Solid Systems to host their servers: Baton Rouge's Explore Interactive and New Orleans' JMJ Services, which moved from an Exodus center.
COPYRIGHT 2001 Louisiana Business, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2002 Gale Group
