An exodus of biblical proportions
By Tom Alexander, correspondent
HostingTech Magazine (November, 2001)
Will Exodus find its way back to the promised land or have hard times slain this Goliath of hosting?
An exodus is defined as a departure, generally of people, but for Exodus Communications (www.exodus.com), the Santa Clara, California-based Web hosting giant, the word might mean a departure of faith in the company. Born in the early 1990s and taken public in 1998, Exodus has been one of the Internet Economy's most high-profile institutions. With its stock hovering well below a buck these days, the company has many wondering if all hope has been lost for what was once a duke in the Internet court.
In a July teleconference, a spokesperson for the media-shy communications company announced the recent opening of four new Internet datacenters (IDCs), in Dallas, Miami, Amsterdam, and Paris. According to the statement, Exodus now has 5.6 million gross square feet in 44 IDCs, located around the world. This would be considered impressive news if the company could prove that its massive acreage of server farmland will be used by paying customers.
The spokeswoman did provide some rosy insight here, saying, "Each of these new facilities was based on contracts from anchor tenants like American Airlines, Inc." This bit of name dropping was no doubt an attempt to highlight Exodus' rock-solid customers at a time when a vast number of its dot-com customers are proving to be castles made of sand. The statement also adds that Exodus has about $320 million in revenue in the year's second quarter. Not surprisingly, the statement did not address the company's debt, reported by the Associated Press to be somewhere in the neighborhood of $3 billion. Nor was any mention made of the impending resignation (or firing, depending on who you believe) of CEO Ellen Hancock.
What the heck happened?
Avraham Shama, a professor at the Anderson Schools of Management at the University of New Mexico, (asm.unm.edu; Albuquerque, New Mexico) tells HostingTech that the Exodus story is a direct reflection on what is happening in the Internet-based economy as a whole.
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