EasyStreet Grows, Part 1:
Today's ISP Growth is in the Data Center

As another Portland ISP grows its data center, we learn why the business services side of the market is booming.

by Alex Goldman ISP-Planet Managing Editor [August 11, 2006]

Rich Bader is the founder of Portland, Ore.-based EasyStreet, an ISP founded to be local, that has grown over time to offer more services. "We're over 11 years old now," Bader notes. "We were founded in the 1995 bubble. This year is the first year since the bubble that we're seeing substantial growth."

Bader thinks that Portland was relatively more bubble-dependant than any other city in the U.S. "The collapse of the bubble hit Portland disproportionately, I think, though that's based purely on anecdotal research at ISPCON. But we always knew that if we hung in here and were positioned with the right services at the right time, we would do well."

Now, those high end services are selling well. "We migrated, over the years, to high end services under the EasyStreet Pro brand name," says Bader. "It's designed for large organization with a professional IT staff, with sophisticated needs. This pro business segment is where we're seeing all the growth."

Like Delaware.net's John McKown (see McKown's article, Server Colocation VS. Managed Servers), Bader is finding that his managed server business is growing faster than colocation. McKown says that's because managed servers are better for both the ISP and the customer. Bader certainly agrees that managed servers are what customers want. "I remember when everybody wanted to configure their own Cisco router," he says. "There are waves in what IT people want. Once you know what a pain it is to do, once the mystery is gone, there's less interest in doing it yourself."

Bader sees Ethernet as the key enabling technology. "Ethernet, metro area networking, is exciting because Ethernet circuits have a price performance advantage over TDM circuits."

Bader is lucky in that Portland has several fiber providers. "Three of the four providers are aggressively pursuing market share. We work with Electric Lightwave, Qwest, and OnFiber."

With those fiber speeds, Bader says, "apps in our data center look like they're running on servers back at the company headquarters. If you've got a 100 Mbps connection to the data center, the WAN is the LAN."

He says that a pervasive standard like Ethernet provides cost benefits beyond the obvious (the obvious benefit is that every computer and laptop has an Ethernet jack). "It's easy to find engineers who know the Ethernet standards."

Of course, at Intel, Bader worked with standard committees himself. "Multibus was the first standard I got involved in," he says. "Intel owned and controlled it, and made it an IEEE standard."

Professional systems
Many successful people we talk to have a system. It can be a well known system for large corporations like that employed by Russ Intravartolo of MegaPOP (now part of US LEC). Intravartolo uses the Six Sigma system as taught by Motorola. It can be religious principles, such as those that guide Rudy Yakym in Indiana or the people at SEMO.net in Missouri. It can be a willingness to take good ideas from everywhere, as John McKown does (see, for example, our Book Review: Don't Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability).

In Bader's case, it's the IT Service Management system taught by the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL). "It's based on research by the British Government on best practices in the UK. It's distilled into books, and we've done training with some of the folks here in Portland."

ITIL certified the trouble ticket system that EasyStreet uses (called Footprints), and is helping Bader create principles for managing change. The way he tells it, it's like common sense, but in a system. "Let's say you build a new application and you find a problem and ask the admin how to fix it. The answer shouldn't be, 'I'll have to take it offline and rewrite it.'"

Following ITIL principles, the company has a cross-disciplinary Change Approval Board (CAB). "The CAB is folks from all around the company who can evaluate the impact of a change: how it affects our SLA, what sort of backup strategy we have if the change goes wrong."

It's about learning from others' mistakes so that you don't have to make those mistakes yourself to learn the lesson.

Being a good citizen
When Bader founded EasyStreet, he wanted to bring the internet to everyone in Portland. A thorough examination of the business plan persuaded him to focus on business customers. The company retains Bader's utopian vision by doing all it can to be good to Portland.

"We work with Chambers of Commerce, industry trade associations, and I've personally been involved in economic development activities in the area," he says.

He works with the Oregon Innovation Council (Oregon InC), which encourages economic development. A key local industry, Bader says, is open source software. That's why, he says, O'Reilly's Open Source conference is held annually in Portland. Oregon State University has an Open Source lab hosting a number of products including Firefox and Apache.

Helping good citizens
EasyStreet has a program for non-profits offering a full 50 percent off regular fees, but offering minimal support. It's for organizations that need a website but know what they're doing.

EasyStreet has relationships with over 250 local non-profit organizations. Bader says the company does far more than offer price reductions. "We sponsor their events and we give away services to raffle off at fundraising events. We find it pays incredible benefits. Our marketing is driven by word of mouth. I'm often amazed at how people hear of us. A lot of it, especially the business customers, comes from our nonprofit work."

EasyStreet is a regular sponsor of the local public broadcast station. "I'm fond of saying that Oregon Public Broadcasting (OPB) shares many qualities with us: it emphasizes quality and integrity, it's part of a bigger thing but it's local, and people depend on it."

However, the company recently hired Karen Karger as director of marketing to upgrade the company's image. We'll explore what she's doing in part two of this article.

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