New Hostway CEO Sees Huge Opportunity in Mid-Market Enterprise Space

Brought to You by The WHIR

Emil Sayegh, Hostway Services CEO, has only been at the company since September, but he already has lots of plans for growing its customer base, particularly in the mid-market enterprise space.

Sayegh, who spent nearly five years at Codero Hosting as CEO and president, said that Hostway is well-positioned to capture this market.

“In the next 12 months we’ll be focused on getting the Hostway story out to the market and to customers, and attracting more customers to the Hostway family,” Sayegh said in an interview with The WHIR. “We’re going to do that through really figuring out how to take our enterprise offerings to the next level.”

Part of this includes focusing on compliance, including solutions around HIPAA and PCI, but it will also include more packaged apps like Magento and WordPress, Sayegh said. He said that part of Hostway’s differentiation is its data center footprint which has locations in the U.S. and Canada.

“There’s a gap in the market for mid-market enterprises where they really don’t want to manage their Magento installation; they don’t want to manage their ecommerce sites anymore,” he said. “I think Hostway could come in and fill that gap in the market with a really robust, enterprise-grade, grown up enterprise offering for Magento and WordPress.”

Hostway’s approach is certainly part of a larger trend seen in the hosting industry where companies who were previously generalists have really carved out a niche, targeting certain customers with specialized technology offerings. Over the past few years WordPress in particular has been more of a focus for hosting providers such as GoDaddy.

“Everyone is having good success; the big companies in this space are having good success. It’s not all AWS, it’s not all Azure, this is going to be coopetition, but you still have to specialize,” he says. “The winners in this market are going to be the ones that pick the vertical and specialize. If you go too broad you’re not going to be recognized for something that you’re a specialist in.”

In order to offer this specialization, Hostway’s team has acquired certifications and expertise along the verticals of e-commerce and compliance to serve customers.

“The people at Hostway really are top notch. I’ve been in this industry for a long time and I’ve had the pleasure to work with a lot of them,” he said.

“If you start looking these customers require – it’s not all cookie cutter,” Sayegh said. “We have a very strong architecture, solution engineering team that helps these customers figure out what technologies they need for these verticalized offerings.”

This first ran at http://www.thewhir.com/web-hosting-news/new-hostway-ceo-sees-huge-opportunity-in-mid-market-enterprise-space