SkyReach Systems, Inc.

No one likes Internet outages. But for David Einstein, Chief Operating Officer of SkyReach Systems, avoiding them is absolutely essential to his business.

SkyReach offers outsourced application hosting for small and medium-sized professional firms. Customers can access their email, calendars, spreadsheets, and custom business applications from anywhere with an Internet connection. A key part of the value proposition is that customers are outsourcing the headache of maintaining their own servers. Security, backups, disaster recovery, connectivity: Customers can sleep easily at night, knowing that someone else is worrying about those things.

That someone else is David Einstein. And while Einstein doesn't get to outsource his own worries, those worries have become a lot less since he moved his hosting operation to Cyberverse in May of 2006.

"There are a lot of second- and third-rate colocation facilities out there," explains Einstein. At a previous provider, SkyReach experienced major problems with power and connectivity outages. "In all honesty, they were horrible. Just horrendous. We ended up leaving the building entirely."

Having moved his systems to a second provider, things were better, though Einstein saw troubling signs. "We were asking questions, and they weren't responding. I started getting a weird feeling about how they were running their operation." Einstein's years of experience told him to pay attention to that feeling. Using a colocation broker service, he got in touch with a number of other providers, including Cyberverse.

"It can be hard to tell how good a facility is based solely on what they tell you up front," says Einstein. "You have to go in and do your own analysis. Really look carefully into how clean and organized their data center is. How redundant are their power and cooling systems? How redundant is their Internet connectivity?"

Einstein liked what he saw at Cyberverse, and his experience since switching to them has only improved his opinion. "In the world of computers, you take it for granted that there are going to be problems," observes Einstein. "It's how your vendor responds to those problems that makes the difference. In terms of communication, taking ownership, and getting problems solved, Cyberverse has been absolutely outstanding. It gives me a lot of comfort."

A case in point was SkyReach's recent move to Cyberverse's new, high-reliability fourth-floor data center. "We'd had some problems in the older facility, and they knew we were anxious to move onto the fourth floor," says Einstein. "They gave us instant notification when it was ready, prepped our cabinet space, helped us make the move, and really rolled out the red carpet. They made it clear that our business was valuable to them."

Einstein returns the compliment, praising Cyberverse's effect on his own business. In a recent email to Cyberverse, Einstein wrote: "I have nothing but stellar words for Cyberverse... You've gone above and beyond the call of duty in all instances, have been highly responsive to all issues where others have fallen flat, and have proven to be a key element in our growth and success as a business. And you can quote me on that."