Digex’s use of Shaquille O’Neal, the Los Angeles Lakers superstar to promote the company as the dominant force in managed hosting worked wonders. The NBA’s most powerful player conveyed in a major advertising campaign that Digex was the web hosting powerhouse.Digex’s use of Shaquille O’Neal, the Los Angeles Lakers superstar to promote the company as the dominant force in managed hosting worked wonders. The NBA’s most powerful player conveyed in a major advertising campaign that Digex was the web hosting powerhouse.

But even though Thomas Davidsson, Senior VP of Digex in Europe, loved the commercials featuring O’Neal —and is aware of their popularity especially in North America and Japan—he is not quite ready to recommend the services of Manchester United’s David Beckham for a European campaign.

Nor does he need to just yet. After opening a data center in London in May 2000, Digex now manages well over 4,300 Windows- and UNIX-based servers. The company’s operating platform was designed with scalability and standardization as central features to accommodate the growth of customers’ Internet operations and web hosting needs.

Davidsson says “with the standardization of hardware and software choices and applications into modules that minimizes implementation times, Digex is able to provide services cost-effectively. Our competitors will usually need to add more people as they acquire customers. We can add customers without increasing headcount.”

This “winning concept” has gained the company leadership in the UK, which the company now seeks to duplicate in France and Germany.

“The UK market is much more mature. But we are seeing through customer acquisitions that France and Germany are quickly gaining acceptance of the outsourcing model,” added Davidsson.

Davidsson sees the demand for managed services to escalate in Europe for the next few years with the most popular services being security, such as firewalls, monitoring and reporting services as well as data backup.

“The market is growing fairly rapidly. Digex has a well-defined product offering. We don’t have to discuss with customers what it is they want and go do it. We are ready to provide services immediately. What we need to do is continue to educate and make ourselves more visible,” noted Davidsson.

That task should be substantially easier with WorldCom as the company’s owner from acquisition in July 2001. Davidsson says the WorldCom backbone—one of the largest in the world— and its huge global distribution channel of over 4,500 sales people as well as existing data centers will enable Digex to expand more quickly in France and Germany.

The expanded partnership with WorldCom will also allow Digex to compete more effectively with archrival, IBM Global Services.

“IBM is the company we meet most often in the market. We don’t see Genuity or Integra as much. I believe Integra (acquired by Genuity in 2001) focuses on companies with one or two server configurations whereas we generally go after the seven- to- fifteen server companies.”

A recent report by market analysis group IDC named IBM Global Services as the number one US player with approximately 19.3 per cent market share. IBM announced in early March 2002 that worldwide customer contracts for its web hosting services soared to an all-time high in 2001, exceeding US$ 2.4 billion (2.74 billion Euros).

Maybe a call to Mr. Beckham is in the works.