With Jordan Lowe, CEO
Name of your Company:ServerCentral, Inc.
What is your company URL?http://www.servercentral.comWho are the founders of your company? What are your company roots?I started ServerCentral along with Daniel Brosk, our COO, as a shared webhosting company headquartered in my college apartment at the University of Illinois – Champaign in March of 2000. We actually started the company with just $1,000 of capital and a credit card terminal – ServerCentral didn’t own a single server at the time! As our hosting volume ramped up, we began colocating servers in nearby Bloomington to host our customers. In 2001, I still had a year of school left, but we decided to move our servers to Chicago and build our own network, and that was the decision which defined our business for the ten years that followed.
Are you a Start-Up or Growth Phase company?Growth Phase
What gave you the idea to start your company? Did it just 'come to you' or were you noodling it for a while?We began with a small Virtual Private Server (VPS) that we used for our own personal websites. At some point we decided that we could use the excess server capacity for other projects, and at the same time we were able to get a very good discount price on domain names. Our marketing plan was to sell discounted domain names at cost to get people in the door, and even better, to give them away for free to customers who chose to host with us. The ever-increasing infrastructure demands of our hosting platform forced us to think bigger, and that’s when we began selling dedicated servers and colocation. As we shifted focus to larger solutions and revenue streams, we sold the shared hosting platform and moved on to managed services, and most recently, to cloud computing. We’re fortunate because we’ve been able to evolve with the Internet, and today we’re key enablers of its growth.
Give us your Elevator Pitch!Headquartered in Chicago, ServerCentral is an industry leading data center solutions provider specializing in infrastructure colocation, IP networking, cloud computing, and managed services. Our strategically-located facilities allow us to serve a diverse roster of clients, from Fortune 500s, to online retailers, small businesses, and more. Your enterprise will benefit from working with a global, single-source provider that knows how to keep IT infrastructure running smoothly.
What problem does your product solve? How does your product make life easier, better, more rewarding?Our solutions relieve IT managers of the stress, time, and overhead costs of building and maintaining an in-house data center. When a company chooses to place their infrastructure with ServerCentral, we ensure their equipment is powered, operating in the optimal environment, and connected to the Internet 100% of the time. Our on-site technicians are available 24/7 to diagnose, troubleshoot, and repair customer equipment. With our robust infrastructure solutions in place, our customers can focus on delivering services to their end users.
What makes you 'special'? How is your product different from the other guys... if there are any other guys anyway...Our services simplify our customers’ IT operations, which in turn drives their success. While various companies offer colocation, nobody matches our level of service inside the data center. Our hiring standards for data center technicians are among the most stringent in the industry, and include everything from cable termination, to Windows and Linux server administration, to network security tasks. We’re passionate about turning our services into our customers’ solutions.
Tell us about your team. Why those roles?Since the company began, the original team has participated in all aspects of the business. Our focus has always been to make decisions that allow our company to scale. One of the most amazing things about ServerCentral is how it creates opportunities for our staff to grow into new roles with greater responsibilities. Now that we’re well-established, we’ve been able to attract talent with key IT and sales leadership backgrounds. So while our company may be eleven years old, our collective experience within the industry numbers in the decades.
It's our kind of town too, but tell us why Chicago. What is easier or harder about being based in Chicago?Chicago is where we’re from and where ServerCentral set its roots. Chicago is a great market geographically, as it is a large networking intersection. Major companies and webhosts appreciate a location with optimal latency and disaster recovery as well. We chose Chicago facilities to not only incorporate our high redundancy, security, and engineering standards, but for their proximity to a vibrant community of connectivity options as well. Chicago is home to some of the most technologically advanced data facilities in the country, allowing us to leverage high-quality resources to provide high-quality services. Plus, we love this town. It’s a mecca of good food and great people.
Work Hard/Play Hard or The Early Bird Gets The Worm?To the demise of our social lives, ServerCentral’s work is play. We provide 100% uptime on power and IP service, and we all take a tremendous amount of pride in doing it.
This one is all you.... Anything else you want to tell us about you, your company?Our company is comprised of individuals who genuinely love what they do. From our IP Engineers and technicians, to our sales people and finance department, we all put our hearts into ServerCentral. It shows in the finer details – like doing what we say, building custom solutions, and treating our customers’ infrastructure the way we like ours to be treated.