Hosted Solutions Named #6 on Fast 50

Triangle Business Journal — November 6, 2009

Hosted Solutions
4321 Lassiter Mills, Suite 200, Raleigh.

Describe your business:
IT infrastructure as a service (IaaS) provider.

Year founded:
2001.

Number of employees:
118.

Top executives:
Rich Lee, CEO; Christopher “Kip” Turco, COO; Malcolm Clarke, CFO; Noreen Allen, VP, marketing.

Anticipated 2009 revenue:
Did not respond.

What is fueling your company’s growth?
IT infrastructure is an essential part of every business – housing the mission critical applications, data and systems that companies rely on. A second of downtime or any compromise with the security of data can be catastrophic to companies. Hosted Solutions manages those mission critical systems and applications.

What is your growth strategy?
We’re focused on continuing to grow within our current markets (Southeast and Boston), and we’re also actively pursuing opportunities for strategic expansion.

What was your biggest success in the past year?
Our biggest success this year was posting such strong operating and financial results in the midst of a challenging climate. In addition, we launched an exciting new product, our Stratus Trusted Cloud offering. We also landed several new large accounts – Lance, Misys, Motricity, Cleveland Cavaliers and significantly expanded our agreements with others such as Belk.

What steps did you take to combat the economic recession?
Our business is one that is very difficult to enter – it requires a lot of capital on the front end to build out data centers, so there are significant barriers to entry, which limits the competitive landscape. In addition, we have a very diverse customer base across multiple industries and they all sign long-term contracts, providing a strong recurring revenue stream. As a result, there’s a lot of stability built into our model, which helps in a tough market. From a sales perspective, we didn’t have much exposure to the down economy because our business tends to do well in the midst of a recession.

If you could go back to the start of the year, operationally, is there something you would have done differently?
We introduced our cloud computing offering mid-year and had a strong response from customers. If I could have done anything differently this year, I would have accelerated the roll-out of cloud and some related services.

What are your company’s chief goals for the next year?
To continue to execute every day for our customers. We’re protecting their mission critical systems and data so that’s always our primary focus. We’ll look for ways we can grow the business and add more value to our customers.

How many employees did you hire in the last 12 months, and how many do you plan to add in the coming year?
Last 12 months, we hired about 30. In the next year, we’ll likely hire about 25 to 30 more.

And finally a couple of questions for the company CEO ...
What executive/CEO do you most admire in the business world?
Jeff Bezos

What keeps you awake at night?
Keeping up with the tremendous customer growth.