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C&W Bails Out
norskode writes "Not much to go on yet, but it seems that Cable & Wireless is bailing out of their US operations. This is a big provider of IP pipes, and they run the data centers they bought from the failed Exodus folks. There are a LOT of sites that live in their data centers, but no word yet on the disposition of those facilities."
C&W pulling out, UUNet/WorldCom not doing real well, BBN getting sucked up by GTE... not much of the original backbones left it seems. Wonder how long until the US Internet is just an interconnection of all the telcos?
Chris -- http://www.bitter.net/
A traceroute to google shows it's using cw.net and exodus.net
This could be bad...
Those data centers have nothing to worry about. Some company is going to buy all of that infrastructure & equipment for pennies on the dollar. It makes sense for them to leave it as is and transfer the existing customer base. Why would they reinvent the wheel if everything is already in place? No need to panic.
The reason Ellen and her gang couldn't keep this running seemed to be they kept building new data centers. Capital costs were HUGE.
But C&W bought exodus. After the fallout. For very very cheap.
How could they not make a profit off this? Is maintaince costs still so high even with no expansion? They were CLOSING data centers not buiding them.
This worries me, because if after the initial build up is done, you still can't make money off a colo then that means prices are WAY too low and for the 2 or 3 colo's left, we are going to see prices sky-rocket to come up to meet expenses.
Sad day.
Someone get a list of sites on their servers, so we can Slashdot them as a fairwell gift ;-)
"Much work is lost, for the lack of a little more." -Edward H. Harriman
It is an interesting problem that faces IT. The hospital I work at uses a mainframe on another site. We are planning to return it to on-site because we had downtime because the company moved their mainframe 'just because' from one side of Atlanta to another.
There is also the fun of who really owns your data? If the site just gets shutdown, how will you get data? (I know they should give it to you in tapes, but then you must find something they will work on.)
In God we trust, all others require data.
What's next rap? Heavy metal? Opera . . . well, it was never that popular.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Here's one...
According to Netcraft, slashdot.org itself is using IPs owned by C&W.
Nothing to see here. Just move along. Ignore the smell of burning monkeys. Flood? What flood? Keep moving, you looky-loos.
Isn't Mae-East located in one of the C&W buildings in the Tysons Corner, Viriginia, USA area? I thought that was where the NSA had installed all of their Echelon sniffers. I bet there is some real back room skullduggery going on if this is true.....
Is that Exodus and other hosting centers are having trouble because they're players in a shrinking middle market for the business of hosters that are:
The price/capability ratio of dedicated hosts (probably Linux/BSD on x86 hardware with really fat pipes) is falling. The difference in total cost between hosting something at Exodus and just building a good server room somewhere on a corporate campus or two is falling. (Initial build-out is expensive, but property is a pretty safe place to sink money these days, plus you can expense it and keep expensing the depreciation.)
I'm not saying there's nobody that needs Exodus-type services, but it's mostly folks that don't fit into one of these other (growing) categories.
"There is no night so forlorn, no mood so bleak, that it cannot be infused with pleasure by tender meat..." - R.W. Apple
As a current C&W employee..
I have to say there really isn't any suprise to this. While its hard for any business to make a profit off of low-margin web-hosting, C&W was an ill-suited company to try and do so.
During the past ~2 years since it acquired both Digital Island and Exodus, C&W business model has been to lay-off people who knew what they were doing, and promote those who didn't (usually to the VP level).
The whole business is run by a very top-heavy management structure who have no interest whatsoever in doing what is good for the company. Instead upper management have only been concerned with building their own empires, even if duplicate functions existed elsewhere in the company.
There is only so long a company can exist with such an attitude, and C&W has hit the end of the road.
I worked at CWUSA from 94 to 2001 and I have been predicting their demise for years now. Around 96 the executives were complaining that they were only making 3 cents of profit for every 6 cent call. Having had experience in a mature sector(retail) I recognized immediately that they were spoiled by huge margins. I knew that once the telecom industry became saturated and they actually had real competition that they would either adapt or change. Management did change but instead of concentrating on their core business, telecom services and custom billing for small businesses(which brought them to the Billion in rvenue mark), they decided to buy MCI's crappy internet backbone and become an internet company. Nevermind that they had no experience in this market and the executives didn't know what they were buying. Internet was sexy and they could market that much easier than boring old long distance. Their long distance service was an incredible cash cow.
New offerings were brought up and provisioning and billing systems were rushing into place(sometimes). Often a new product would have to be provisioned manually and there was no way to tell if a customer wasn't paying their bill for well over a year after they first started selling the product.
Then to top it all off the mothership(PLC) decided they were going to become a global organization and they ended up picking up the biggest inept blowhards in CWUSA to help create the global organization. While all this was going on they were still having their yearly layoffs, which they did even when they were making a billion a year. Management would lay off the workers and keep the management around. It was not uncommon to know of managers and directors with no people.
Not long after I left they decided to lay off all the techincal people and outsource the work to IBM. Many people were gone for good and many were tranferred to IBM. But the funniest thing about this grand plan was the first task of the plan-- assign a senior management team to organize the layoffs(to them management teams were the "magic pixie dust"). Those people were so management happy that they have a few building in Vienna Virginia stocked with managers, senior managers, director and AVPs that are quite adept at bullshitting, creating powerpoint documents and dodging bullets but they can't manage a damn thing. I could write for hours about the shenanigans that went on in that place but I'll just end with something an old relative who has been a businessman since WWII told me. "Anyone can make money when times are good, it's when times are tough that you find out who the real businessmen are." They were poseurs and it was only a matter of time before their hubris coupled with reality bite them in the ass. The sad thing is these same losers will end up getting nice cushy management positions at Verizon, Worldcom or AT&T and probably for more money.