Sep 13, 2002 : The webhost industry: week review

📅 September 13, 2002 - It seems fitting that during the week that included the anniversary of the terrible terrorist acts of September 11 2001, the Web hosting industry would see some major developments in the products and services surrounding Internet security. More significantly, perhaps, the communication business was also witness to a number of substantial acquisitions and divestitures.
On Monday, managed Internet service provider VIA NET.WORKS said that it had completed the sale of its Mexican subsidiary, VIA NET.WORKS Mexico SA de CV, to a group of investors led by the facility's existing management team.
The sale completes the company's efforts since the beginning of the year to completely divest itself of its Latin American operations, which originally included operations in Argentina and Brazil.
On Thursday, optical Internet service provider Cogent Communications Group Inc. announced that it has acquired key assets from optical Ethernet service provider FiberCity network. The acquisition includes a majority of FiberCity's customer base, as well as its building access segments. According to the terms of the deal, FiberCity Networks will also cease operations.
Also on Thursday, managed IT service provider ClearBlue Technologies said that it had acquired a majority stake in managed Web Hosting company NaviSite Inc. ClearBlue says it has acquired HP Financial Services? 3.2 million NaviSite shares and $55 million in convertible notes, and 79 percent of NaviSite's current equity. Converting the notes being acquired, says ClearBlue would give it 94 percent of the company's outstanding stock.
On Friday it was reported that IBM has moved another step closer to the successful completion of its acquisition of the consulting arm of PriceWaterhouseCoopers. Partners in the accountancy approved IBM's $3.5 billion bid for the acquisition, which has already met with approval from European Union anti-trust investigators.
In an industry growing increasingly aware of the need for digital security, this week also saw a number of developments in Internet security products and practices and the services supporting them, as some network hardware providers announced that they were incorporating security features directly into their products, and a number of security solution providers moved to gain share in a growing market.
On Tuesday, application switching equipment provider Radware said that it had signed an agreement Internet security provider SecureNet Limited to offer real-time application and resource security to customers. Radware says SecureNet will use Radware's DoS Shield to provide DoS and DDoS detection and protection to its government institution and corporate enterprise customers.
Also on Tuesday, traffic management solution provider F5 Networks Inc. announced that, according to a recent report by research group Infonetics, F5 continues to lead the market for SSL acceleration in the layer 4 to 7 switch/load balancer with SSL category. In the first half of 2002, the company's lead grew to 67 percent of unit market share and 79 percent of revenue market share.
Offering SSL support of its own, computing hardware manufacturer HP announced on Monday that it had set record benchmarks for processing encrypted Internet transactions with its entry-level and midrange servers running both HP-UX 11i and PA-RISC and Intel Itanium 2 environments. The company said its 4-, 8- and 16-processor servers showed superior performance on the SPECweb99_SSL benchmark, a well-respected measure of SSL transaction handling ability.
Internet security company Comodo, the company responsible for the InstantSSL product, made several significant announcements this week after introducing partner relationships with hosting companies for the distribution of its SSL service.
On Tuesday, Comodo and Web hosting company C I Host announced that they have formed a partnership intended to help deliver Web server security and identity assurance solutions to C I Host customers. C I Host will integrate Comodo's InstantSSL certificates and TrustLogo Web identity service into its range of hosting-related products and services, offering them to its customer base of over 175,000 businesses and consumers.
And on Wednesday, the company announced that the SSL reseller operated by Web hosting company Weberz had partnered with Comodo to offer InstantSSL through its SSL4Less brand. SSL4Less, which already has a significant position in the SSL reseller market, will re-launch as an InstantSSL provider, offering the complete range of Web server security products and TrustLogo identity services.
As new solutions are continually developed to combat new and old threats, the market for Internet security solutions continues to grow, both in size and significance. And as a business that relies heavily on the success of Internet transactions, the Web hosting industry can pay especially close attention to developments in the security business, as solutions grow faster, more secure and more affordable. In the months to come, security will remain one of the related areas to which hosting providers pay the closest attention.