Hostway, Hosting.com Merge to Offer More Hybrid, Multicloud Options

There's a new name in the cloud landscape, but it's a company that already has solid roots and a plan for the future.

The company is Ntirety, the result of the merger of Hostway and Hosting.com that officially took place in January. The two companies have been involved in integration activities throughout the year, culminating in the new name and branding.

The combined company has 14 data centers worldwide and provides services ranging from traditional hosting and co-location to hybrid, hybrid and multicloud enablement.

Leading Ntirety as its president and CEO is Emil Sayegh, who ran Hostway prior to the merger. Sayegh's cloud experience extends even further, as he led Rackspace's cloud computing division as general manager from 2008 to 2010.

In an interview with ITPro Today, Sayegh shares his views on the current state of the cloud landscape and outlines where Ntirety is headed in the months ahead.

Why did Hostway and Hosting.com merge?

There is a lot of cross-pollination between the teams, and we were pretty familiar with Hosting.com, so we decided to join forces. There's a lot of complementary synergies between the two teams.

The logic behind the merger is that we're focused on enterprise customers. To put a finer point to it, we are focused on customers that frankly are about 15 years or older and that are anywhere between $300 million in revenue to $3 billion in revenue. They have multiple applications, and they're being directed to move to the cloud. But it's complex to move to the public cloud, and they have to figure it out.

We come in and we help them manage things including their assets on-premises, where we will move some of their assets to our data centers. We have 14 data centers globally now.

We have expertise in Azure, and AWS as well. Hostway brought the Azure expertise, whereas Hosting.com brought the AWS expertise. So together, we're able to essentially cover every possible infrastructure out there and stack a layer of management on top of it that includes security, patching, alerting, so on and so forth.

What is the name “Ntirety” all about?

Both companies have grown through acquisition, so we own tons of cool names, actually.

Ntirety is the name that really personifies what we're doing, which is bringing the entirety of the IT solutions to enterprise IT. We bring the ability to manage the entirety of a company's cloud solution or IT infrastructure.

In the modern cloud world, is there still a need for co-location?

Some customers, they have gear on prem that they just don't want to manage anymore.

So, I mean, absolutely, co-location is part of the equation, and it's part of the mix that we offer to our customers, and that's what makes us unique, as well. We have colocation in our 50% of our data centers.

How do you see and define hybrid and multicloud? Are they synonyms for each other or two different things?

I don't think analysts or reporters agree on the terms. … For us, multicloud is multiple public clouds. Hybrid means it's a combination of on prem, off prem and public cloud.

So we do both. We have a pretty cool portal that will allow customers to see their public cloud, whether it's Azure, AWS or their on-prem, off-prem resources, and provide certain degrees of control.

One of the things that differentiates us from all the rest is our contractual commitments to customers to deliver business outcomes. We manage all these infrastructure assets, and we commit to our customers to deliver monthly or quarterly insights that will help them either improve their risk profile, their cost profile, or increase their agility.

In certain cases, we will absolutely commit to a cost reduction threshold. If we're coming into a new account where … they've had a big sprawl on AWS and they're having a problem managing their AWS costs assets, we will do an assessment and actually will commit to a cost reduction target or else we will pay them the difference. This is what we call GLA – guidance-level agreements – and it's pretty well-embedded into our operations structure.

What are some of the misconceptions that people have about your business?

People that know Hostway especially used to think of us as a small, medium business brand. And oh, by the way, that will continue to be to be a small, medium business brand because we still have a business that is targeted on SMB. So with time, that's going to become just an SMB brand. It's going to kind of be what it used to be 20 years ago, which is shared hosting domain names, email, so on and so forth. So that brand is owned by us; it's still relevant.

I was recently talking to a Fortune 50 company CIO, who said he remembered getting his first domain name and email from Hostway and he didn't know that the company had moved into the enterprise space.

So a lot of customers, especially the ones that knew us when we were small, medium business oriented, still have that image of us.

We view ourselves as an enterprise player and certainly a business player.