Verio's Channel Program

It's no longer enough to have state of the art data centers. Even the largest webhosts are talking to their customers and resellers to learn more about who they are and what they want.

by Alex Goldman ISP-Planet Managing Editor [May 16, 2006]

Back in 2000, when Japan's ILEC, NTT, acquired Verio, the company was viewed as so vital to U.S. security that the deal had to be cleared by the White House.

Yesterday, Harry Hollines, vice president of channels and business development sat down for a talk about how Verio works with its smaller customers. The White House was not a topic of conversation.

The normalcy of Verio
Instead, the company is focusing on the sorts of issues that every webhost is concerned about, but it is able to devote more resources to development than most.

Verio claims to have developed the first Virtual Private Server (VPS) system, back in 1994. Hollines says that although the solution was used initially only by technically savvy customers, Verio's market research shows that all kinds of customers are using it now.

He says that small business customers come to Verio and its resellers because support is important. The company has added QuickBooks integration as well as other small business-friendly features, responding to customer demand.

The company is also making it easier for resellers to support small business customers. It announced Verio Reseller Business Tools (RBT) in January of this year, a suite of tools to make it easier to handle billing and accounting. The company is working to make its control panel more user friendly, and expects that work to be complete in the latter half of this year.

The SMB needs
Hollines identifies three key needs for a small business:

1. Small businesses need a professional website.
2. Small businesses need to maintain the website, and are willing to pay a monthly fee to work with a Verio designer on changes to content and to the look and feel of the site.
3. Small businesses need help selling on the web.

The marketing part is perhaps the most complex. Verio will announce a marketing package in Q3 of this year. The package will assist small businesses in search engine optimization (SEO) and placement, affiliate marketing, and e-mail campaigns. Verio is working with a partner (not yet announced) on SEO. It is working with several affiliate marketing advisors who match the business up with organizations according to the business type.

The channel
Verio's channel is broad and diverse, ranging from Fortune 500 companies that expect their own dedicated account teams to respond to daily requests, to individual web designers, to rural ILECs and CLECs. The company has over 3,500 resellers, Hollines says, and the company talks regularly to the top 50 or so. "We have a reseller board that meets regularly."

Hollines expects that future success in the channel will come as the industry starts paying more attention to marketing and to its customers. "We've stopped selling technology, and are now selling solutions," says Hollines.

"It's a different kind of sale, when you're selling to a small business customer," he says. "The customer doesn't want to hear about gigabytes of storage."

Instead, the customer wants to know how easy it is to get a website, wants to know that help will be available when needed, and wants to avoid a CLI interface. "I'm surprised at how many small businesses still don't have a website," says Hollines.

Of course, that's the good news for everyone in the industry. There's plenty of room to grow.

—End