Commander Communications, the telephone manufacturing company that was led to an IPO last December by its IT industry veteran managing director John Dougall, plans to race into the Internet age through a deal with managed Internet services provider WebCentral. Through the deal Commander plans to offer Web hosting and related services to its 125,000 customers.
"By leveraging our large customer base and national sales and services workforce we expect to quickly gain a significant share of the fast-growing Web-hosting market", explained Dean Gingell, deputy managing director of Commander. "We plan to achieve 10 per cent market share in Web hosting by 2004. At that time, hosting will be part of most SMEs' integrated communications environments."
Gingell said that Australia's Web hosting market is expected to grow from $A60 million in 1999/2000 to $A352 million by 2002/2003. According to IDC SMEs will represent about 60 per cent of the market.
Gingell added that customers of the new service will receive sales, support and billing directly from Commander, which will also retain ownership of the customers and their data.
Commander's new business will be managed by David Kerr, who was recently appointed general manager of Web hosting. He joined Commander from Fairfax Online where he was general manager of business development.