Oct 9, 2002 : Sphera Announces Major European Growth
📅 - Web hosting automation solution developer Sphera Corporation (sphera.com) said on Wednesday that the company has announced 25 new European customer wins including hosting providers Star Internet, AMEN and COMBELL, as the company continues an impressive year of sales and growth.
"We've now done 32 new deals in the last six months, from April 1 to the end of September," says Sphera VP Europe Ian Osborne. "It's obviously pretty exciting in what amounts to still a pretty distressed market in general terms. We're pretty pleased and excited by what's happening and see it really as validation of our value."
Sphera says it provides a platform enabling business flexibility and satisfaction through high-end functionality based on Sphera's Virtual Dedicated Server technology and European language support.
The company's flagship product, Hosting Director, provides an open architecture that offers automation and better management of all aspects of a Web hosting operation on Linux, Solaris or Windows 2000 operating systems, says Sphera.
According to Osborne, the European market presents certain unique challenges to a developer of a solution like hosting automation.
"It's highly distributed, in the sense that Europe is made up of 20-plus countries," he says, "and therefore at least 20-plus economic centers. The issues are obvious in terms of local language support, for example. You need to support Italian, French, Spanish, English, Dutch, German, and so on. There are seven or eight main languages to support."
The variety spread out across Europe also presents unique challenges to the hosting business, says Osborne.
"In terms of the buying culture," he says, "I think it's quite nationalistic in the sense that, for example, German businesses like to do their hosting with German data centers, French businesses with French data centers, and so on. And at the front end, in terms of the types of things that are hosted, there's also a lot of regional variation. Shopping carts, for example, are typically only relevant to a particular geography."
Osborne says the design of Sphera's solution has helped to minimize certain of the challenges posed by the European market, while others simply have to be met.
"The design of our technology is abstract to those issues," he says, "and the ability to support local languages is done in a way that is very easy and doesn't cause any overhead at all. But you might say there's a sales overhead because success in one geography doesn't necessarily mean success in another."
"We've now done 32 new deals in the last six months, from April 1 to the end of September," says Sphera VP Europe Ian Osborne. "It's obviously pretty exciting in what amounts to still a pretty distressed market in general terms. We're pretty pleased and excited by what's happening and see it really as validation of our value."
Sphera says it provides a platform enabling business flexibility and satisfaction through high-end functionality based on Sphera's Virtual Dedicated Server technology and European language support.
The company's flagship product, Hosting Director, provides an open architecture that offers automation and better management of all aspects of a Web hosting operation on Linux, Solaris or Windows 2000 operating systems, says Sphera.
According to Osborne, the European market presents certain unique challenges to a developer of a solution like hosting automation.
"It's highly distributed, in the sense that Europe is made up of 20-plus countries," he says, "and therefore at least 20-plus economic centers. The issues are obvious in terms of local language support, for example. You need to support Italian, French, Spanish, English, Dutch, German, and so on. There are seven or eight main languages to support."
The variety spread out across Europe also presents unique challenges to the hosting business, says Osborne.
"In terms of the buying culture," he says, "I think it's quite nationalistic in the sense that, for example, German businesses like to do their hosting with German data centers, French businesses with French data centers, and so on. And at the front end, in terms of the types of things that are hosted, there's also a lot of regional variation. Shopping carts, for example, are typically only relevant to a particular geography."
Osborne says the design of Sphera's solution has helped to minimize certain of the challenges posed by the European market, while others simply have to be met.
"The design of our technology is abstract to those issues," he says, "and the ability to support local languages is done in a way that is very easy and doesn't cause any overhead at all. But you might say there's a sales overhead because success in one geography doesn't necessarily mean success in another."
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