Large Fortune 500 companies are not the only ones interested in high-end Web and application hosting infrastructure.
Military.com, a portal for the millions of men and women serving in the US armed forces, entered into a long-term agreement with Intira, a provider of e-commerce infrastructure. Military has registered 200,000 users since it launched six weeks ago.
The deal signifies an interesting shift in the attitudes of new dot coms and adds some validity to the business case of service providers building ASP-oriented infrastructure.
Intira charges a fortune for its services. Intira's chief executive Bernie Schneider once told Inter@ctive Week that an average Intira customers pays between US$35,000 and US$100,000 a month. That's a far cry from US$500 to US$1,000 a month most dot coms traditionally pay when colocating or renting a dedicated server from the likes of Exodus Communications or GlobalCenter. The high price tag apparently meets Military's needs.
"As a start-up, we can't tolerate failure," said Anne Dwane, Military's vice president of marketing.
The reason why a dot com chose to go with an infrastructure provider that caters to ASPs is the range of advanced services that the portal plans to use in order to build user loyalty. One of these services is a personnel locator, a vast database that would automatically update records with whereabouts of moving military personnel. An extension of this service is on-going maintenance of users' online address books, which are automatically updated if the person listed moves or changes any other information like telephone numbers.
Intira offered to develop and maintain these and other applications, a service that made Military's choice financially reasonable.
"We were less than 20 people when we launched, and we knew we needed a very full service provider," said Dwane.
Military is backed with US$18 million invested by various VCs including Broadview, and a media giant Primedia.
