BUSINESS
Hosting365 invests EUR2m, creates 20 jobs
06-03-2008
by Charlie Taylor
After being on the tail end of some bad publicity of late, there's some good news to report on Hosting365, which has created 20 jobs as part of a new investment.
The outsourced IT services and internet hosting provider has announced a EUR2 million investment in its infrastructure, which will enable it to offer its customers on-demand IT services such as Software-as-a-Service (SaaS).
The investment has seen the firm incorporate blade server and virtualisation technology into its existing facilities in order to offer a range of new services. Hosting365 signed deals with HP to provide the blade server technology and with VMware for the virtualisation software.
"By combining the VMware layer with the high availability, high performance components of the HP infrastructure, Irish companies can, for the first time, avail of the benefits of a multimillion euro infrastructure for a cost less then a traditional dedicated server," said Hosting 365's sales director, Paul Lynch, in a statement.
"This approach to how managed hosting is delivered will change not only how it is viewed in Ireland, but also globally," he added.
Following the investment in infrastructure, the company has recruited 20 additional staff. The new recruits include senior UNIX, Networking and Microsoft engineers, as well as technical infrastructure staff.
The company said it also plans to hire an additional 14 staff in its Dublin headquarters and at its recently opened Polish office by the end of the year.
The decision to invest in infrastructure follows on the heels of bad publicity for the firm. In February, the company's managing director Stephen McCarron was faced with a 'Mea Culpa' moment when he had to apologise to clients after an outage which lasted for several hours. This followed a similar outage in June 2007 when services to websites and e-mail systems hosted by the firm were adversely affected.
Speaking to ENN, Hosting 365's marketing director Ed Byrne said that a significant sum had been spent on upgrading its infrastructure to ensure that a similar situation wouldn't occur again.
According to Byrne, while EUR1.2 million of the EUR2 million investment announced on Thursday was spent on the company's new blade platform, an additional EUR800,000 was also invested in its data centre infrastructure to enable it to respond to its clients needs.
Hosting365, which claims to be Ireland's leading internet hosting provider with 35 percent market share and over 50,000 customers, was established in 2001.
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