Hostworks spends $5m on new IT systems

Web hosting company Hostworks is spending $5 million on new IT systems in an attempt to gain more enterprise business.

Hostworks was founded a decade ago with a business model based around web hosting for consumer sites such as NineMSN and Ticketek.

But of late, says Hostworks sales manager Klaus Bartosch, the Broadcast Australia-owned company has invested in new tools with a view to becoming an outsourced hosting provider for the mission-critical applications of large organisations.

"We're expanding more broadly into the enterprise market," he told iTnews.

Hostworks is spending $5 million over the next two years on what it calls the Future Service Delivery project, which aims to "provide Hostworks with the underlying platform, processes, tools and capabilities to deliver a new level of quality services."

Last month, Hostworks purchased the Microsoft System Centre software suite, a tool used for the management of Microsoft applications, plus a management suite from Quest Software, a tool which allows Hostworks to manage applications on UNIX and Linux platforms.

The installation of these software suites will be complete by June.

A second phase of the project, due September 2009, will involve the acquisition of several other system management tools, none of which Hostworks is prepared to make public.

Bartosch said that about half of the company's 75 clients trust Hostworks not only to manage their online presence, but also their back-end systems.  The web hosting company has experience hosting financial suites such as Oracle, SAP and Business One, he said.

For example, Hostworks manages Oracle enterprise applications for its third largest customer, Compass Group. It also manages much of the back-end systems (including data warehousing and finance systems) for large e-tailers such as Seek and Ticketek.

"More and more often we find ourselves competing with IBM and Fujitsu," Bartosch said. "And our service surpasses theirs, hands-down, consistently. The difference is that our customers aren't known by number - we know them by name."