Countries with upcoming economies are very important to LeaseWeb. At this moment LeaseWeb is focusing on markets like Spain, Italy, Russia, Turkey and Eastern European countries like Poland, Romania, Hungary, the Czech Republic, and Bulgaria. Mainly because they have upcoming economies with an underdeveloped Internet infrastructure and a definite need for high quality Internet presence.
In Turkey, for example, the importance of Internet presence is even pushed by the government. There are billboards on the sides of the roads saying ‘Internet is the vitamin for your children’, and Turkish companies are currently required to have a domain name and an email address.
LeaseWeb’s appeal in countries with emerging markets has an obvious reason. Internet connections in those areas are still not comparable to those in Amsterdam. Connections in Amsterdam are faster and far more stable. In addition, LeaseWeb’s network, with its capacity of more than 750 Gigabits per second, is very attractive to those countries.
TH: Tell us about the typical clients you encounter.
CZ: Most of LeaseWeb’s clients are professional customers like system integrators, Web designers, hosting resellers and Web developers. For them it means they have a highly stable and accessible Web environment to sell in the Eastern European market. We have quite a number of customers in those markets for whom it’s easy to sell their services on top of our basic Web hosting building blocks, with unique selling points like ‘Amsterdam’, ‘LeaseWeb network’, and ‘AMS-IX, DE-CIX and LINX peering connections’.
TH: Do companies from North America have misconceptions about approaching the European market?
CZ: First, there are misconceptions towards the range of continents you can serve out of one specific location. In theory, as a North American hosting company you can deliver hosting services to European clients with good fiber connections to the European continent only. For latency purposes, however, some clients, usually the larger and more corporate ones, might ask you for local European presence in terms of data center facilities and network capacity.
For this reason, Wikimedia, as an example chose to have local presence in Europe. They came to LeaseWeb for their European Internet traffic and got a capacity of 2 Gigabit per second in LeaseWeb’s European network. Apart from that they have local European data center presence. Wikimedia not only houses 300 servers in a data center facility in Florida, they also have more than 50 servers in the data center of EvoSwitch in the Amsterdam region.
Lots of misconceptions (surround) the cultural differences in communication customs however. The hosting business especially is a business where lots of transactions are done on a distance and without any face-to-face contact. This makes the process of selling hosting services even more difficult. You always have to be aware that speaking the same language on the telephone does not always imply that you understand each other.
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