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Goin South
Portera Systems has been something of a trailblazer in the application services business, focusing on a vertical market — professional services — before vertical markets were cool and becoming the first ASP to offer services based on Oracle software. Now, the company is pushing in a new direction: south. “About 15 percent of our business in recent quarters has been coming from international markets, and Latin America is ramping faster than Europe,” says Portera CEO Gary Steele. Portera opened a sales office in Mexico City in the third quarter of 2000 and is working with services firm Azurian in Brazil, Chile and Costa Rica. “There is a perception in the ASP community that international markets are nascent and immature, but we are seeing a strong reception across diverse customers,” Steele says. Porteras No. 1 selling point abroad has been letting customers avoid the expense and complexity of building their own information technology infrastructure.
Not for Sale
“People ask us all the time about licensing and owning and managing our software, but we dont have shrink-wrapped CD-ROMs,” says Graeme Jarvis, director of software engineering at StorageNetworks. The company is scheduled to announce today, April 9, new software services to make its managed storage services more accessible. Customers like the way StorageNetworks gets diverse storage devices to work together, but a portal product and other applications arent available for sale. “We use software to leverage our services,” Jarvis says. StorageNetworks does offer to manage an enterprises existing storage assets as part of its service.