Cable & Wireless targets midsize market
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NEW YORK - Cable & Wireless is launching a set of services and a Web site - called Bluefield - that are designed to let small and midsize businesses buy and manage IP services more effectively.
The first Bluefield service, the Bluefield Dedicated Premier Web Hosting service, offers a dedicated Web server with basic Web design and e-commerce software for $595 per month.
Bluefield debuted last week at Internet World Fall 2000 in New York.
"Cable & Wireless is offering small and midsize users a good value service for the money," says Joel Yaffe, an analyst at Cambridge, Mass., consulting firm Giga Information Group.
The service includes an IBM Netfinity 4000 Web server, 256M bytes of RAM, a 20G-byte hard drive, three IP addresses, 10 e-mail accounts, 256K bit/sec dedicated bandwidth and weekly backups. The service also includes FrontPage Extensions, e-Urchin Reporting and ColdFusion software. Users can also add AbleCommerce 2.9 software to their setup. Customers can purchase the service directly from www.bluefield.com.
The Web site has information from partners such as Iconixx and Conserve that specialize in Web design and development and Quick Marketing and BiggerNet that specialize in marketing services. Customers can also find information about firms specializing in IT and application development consulting, such as Magna Infotech and Nims Associates.
Although the service is priced competitively, Cable & Wireless will face stiff competition in this arena, Yaffe says. AT&T, Sprint, UUNET, PSINet and Verio are going after the same market, he says.
Yaffe says before users shop for a service provider, they should have an idea of the features they need to launch a Web site or support remote access. With a clear outline, customers can map the features they want with a service provider's offering.
Cable & Wireless offers its Bluefield Dedicated Premier Web Hosting customers SLAs that cover network and server performance. The SLA guarantees 99.99% network availability, 99% packet delivery, server availability of 99.99% and round-trip latency will not exceed 70 milliseconds. Customers are credited one day of service if the ISP does not live up to any one of the guarantees.
Cable & Wireless: www.cw-usa.net
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