Slick and fast growth can only be achieved by moving to the cloud, according to Planet Hippo's Managing Director Darren Lavender, who built the company from scratch and is now busy turning even bigger plans for expansion into action.
Planet Hippo was formed in 2005 by Lavender and Jeremy Rose, founder and Managing Director of Ocean Telecom, a provider of mobile telephony solutions to corporate users in the UK. "We started out by testing the concept of Planet Hippo with Ocean Telecom's customers, then developed the core elements of the business including the billing platform and website," explained Lavender. "Over the next three to four years we concentrated on enhancing our proposition with the addition of services such as Microsoft Exchange mail, Website Designer packages and Virtual Private Servers on both Linux and Windows."
Planet Hippo is part of The Network Selector Group and has consistently been voted by users (individual and corporate) as one of the top UK web hosting companies on Web Hosting Directory, an online service that rates companies across the UK, USA, Canada and Australia. The firm is growing by around 80-90 per cent every year, driven not only by growing its user base organically, but also by an increasing number of digital agencies that are outsourcing their web hosting operations to the company. "We are also pursuing a programme of strategic acquisitions that will enable us to expand our reach across the UK," noted Lavender.
Another important extension of the company's capabilities was developing its own email platform, pointed out Lavender. "It eliminated overnight the spam and virus problems that customers were having using the shared resources that we used when we started out," he added. "This gave us a reliable and resilient platform that was totally under our control, and enabled us to offer a higher level of service to customers."
Making the move from a single server presence to cloud-based networks gave the company a more flexible platform. With web hosting packages starting from just £1 per month, the company has an agile approach to providing tailored solutions. "We also offer reseller hosting solutions that enable web developers, web designers, freelancers, web hosting agencies and IT professionals to outsource the hosting of their websites," added Lavender. "This eliminates the need for resellers to invest in their own infrastructure, security and support teams to meet the prevailing customer demand for 24/7 uptime."
Planet Hippo also takes care of server maintenance, including back-ups, security, software installations and more, allowing resellers to concentrate on growing their businesses instead of supporting their own hosting service. "The investment we made in building new data centres can be leveraged by resellers to provide clients with a value added service," added Lavender.
His entrance into comms territory was selling mobile phones in the retail sector during 1999. Having achieved success, he moved to selling mobile telephony to corporate clients and won many important deals. A stint in IT marketing followed, working for a company that provided mobile telephony and web-based services including hosting, website development and support. But Lavender's greatest achievement to date is building Planet Hippo from scratch into one of the UK's fastest growing ISPs and partnering with key technology vendors. One of the latest innovations is a partnership with Cisco making Planet Hippo the first ISP to offer the new Cisco Energy Management-as-a-Service offering on an e-commerce basis. This cloud-based solution helps corporate and public sector users to cut IT energy costs by up to 35 per cent and provides 100 per cent visibility into the energy use of every network connected device, according to Lavender.
The Energy Management-as-a-Service solution measures and manages the energy use of all connected devices from any vendor, including switches and routers, desktops and laptops, monitors, wireless access points, IP phones, printers and copiers across distributed office and data centre environments. "We provide a web-based portal where users can access a single dashboard showing wasted and saved energy for every IP-connected device, along with detailed energy data collection information and specific recommendations for optimising energy usage," noted Lavender.
Planet Hippo has also launched a new IaaS solution. It provides corporate users with a scalable, secure and cost-effective way to deploy cloud hosting, offering 99.99 per cent availability and zero packet loss to meet SLA requirements. "It offers greater flexibility and scalability than traditional web hosting by enabling corporate users to accelerate their delivery of cloud services and achieve significant cost reductions," explained Lavender. "This is done by reducing their reliance on premise-based IT infrastructure and eliminating the need for costly and obsolete centralised storage."
Lavender's current focus and priority is moving to the cloud, a migration that will enable the company to grow without the high level of investment associated with running its own in-house infrastructure. "The move to cloud will enable us to deliver a higher quality of service as well as offer faster speeds, increased reliability and redundancy including failovers and back-ups," said Lavender. "Before the end of 2015 we expect Planet Hippo to be a 100 per cent cloud-based operation."