Tucows has a long standing in the market, and its focus on the needs of the ISP has helped it to maintain that position. Any ISP operator looking for a way to offer domain name registration services shouldn't have to look any further than OpenSRS.

by Jeff Goldman [July 2, 2001]

Among ISPs working with an ICANN-accredited registrar to offer domains for their customers, one of the most popular options available is Tucows' OpenSRS service, a wholesale domain name registration solution built specifically for the ISP reseller market.

Founded in 1993, The Toronto-based Tucows offers a content delivery network with over 30,000 software titles, in addition to its registrar services. Tucows' retail domain registration service, Domain Direct, offers domain registration to end users on a site that's kept completely separate from the wholesale OpenSRS offering.

Ross Rader is Tucows' Director of Innovation and Research—or as he puts it, "the guy they blame for coming up with the idea behind OpenSRS." According to Rader, Tucows has had something of a charmed history, and the fact that it's always kept its business closely tied to the ISP market has a lot to do with that.

"It's the typical Internet fairy tale thing," Rader said. "Just like Yahoo! started off with a couple of college guys in their basement, same thing with Tucows. OpenSRS came specifically as a result of some of the other programs that we had built for ISPs. We had one of the first Internet starter kits in a box in North America—we built it specifically for ISPs back in '94. So we've had a long history of doing stuff for that constituency."

While the registrar doesn't cover every single domain available, it does offer .cc, .ca, .tv, .co.uk, and .org.uk domains, as well as multilingual domains in Chinese, Japanese and Korean. For foreign ISPs, the entire OpenSRS site can also be accessed in German, Spanish, Chinese, Japanese and Korean.

According to Rader, the company's intent has always been to make things as straightforward as possible for ISPs.

"We didn't come into this as a retailer saying, 'How do we increase our market share,'" Rader said. "We didn't come into this as a chemical engineering company saying, 'How do we get into the dot-com craze?' We came into this saying, 'How do we do good things for ISPs and web hosts?' So right off the bat, it's completely API-driven."

And, he notes, OpenSRS' API is as fully functional as possible—something that helps the registrar to stand out from many others now offering APIs.

Get into huge quantities and they'll consider negotiating a discount, but Rader explains that the intent is to keep things even between resellers. "It's basically one price per product," he said. "We try and keep the playing field as level as possible for our partners. Certainly, there's extreme volume discounting in place, but whether you're buying 20 or 200, you're paying the prices on the web site." Made for your ISP One key issue that many ISPs face in implementing a domain registration solution is the challenge of maintaining control of the customer relationship. Rader contends that any ISP implementing OpenSRS' API can rest assured that the customer will be unlikely ever to realize they're working with a reseller. "It's completely transparent, 100 percent transparent, so 99 percent of the time you're buying from Tucows as a consumer, you have no ideaunless you're looking at the fine print in the contact, or the person that's actually done the private labeling hasn't done a very good job," Rader said.

Tucows has a long standing in the market, and its focus on the needs of the ISP has helped it to maintain that position. According to Rader, any ISP looking for a way to offer domain registration to its customers shouldn't have to look any further than OpenSRS.

"It's built for ISPs, it's built for web hosts, and the organization around it is also built to serve the same needs," he said. "That's really the core value proposition that we bring to the table. We may not have the fanciest trade show booths or a hundred bazillion dollars in the bank—but that's what's got our company where it is today, that's what keeps our customers happy, and that's what we're going to continue to do through tomorrow."

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	[Apr. 13, 2001]	EDUCAUSE to Take Control of .edu Registry
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