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TWST: Can we begin with a company overview and a discussion of your merger with
EV1Servers?
Mr. Erwin: The two biggest and best hosting companies, Dallas-based The Planet
and Houston-based EV1Servers, merged in May. Our investors and I believe the
hosting business has tremendous potential for growth, and there are many
exciting things happening. For example, our potential and current customers are
looking for places to host their IT operations. Today, it is cost prohibitive
for businesses to build data centers for their open system products to run them
24/7. If you think back to the days of the mainframe, the mainframe was built in
glass houses, it was built for redundancy, and it was built for 99.99999%
uptime. When the open systems business came into being, availability wasn't such
a big concern because it was not mission critical; it involved general and
departmental absence. Twenty years later, the open systems businesses are more
than 50% of the installed base around the world and they are running mission-
critical assets. The problem is that people haven't and don't want to spend the
money to build environments they run 24/7 with backup generators, batteries,
etcetera. It has caused problems for the whole new industry, and our belief is
that the open systems business will continue to grow. Analysts say it is going
to grow somewhere between 17% and 22% a year, and we have a significant
opportunity to grow and play in that space. TWST: With the combined company where will you have established footprints?
Mr. Erwin: Headquarters for the new company will be in Houston, Texas. Our
current footprint includes several data centers in Houston and several in
Dallas, but nearly 50% of our customer base is located outside the United
States. We have a drawing all over, because our footprint has centralized data
centers.
Tickers included in this excerpt: PVT
For more information call (212) 952 7433. The
Wall Street Transcript does not endorse any of the comments made by interviewees, and does
not make stock recommendations.
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