Interviewed on 3 Dec 07
Tony Lucas, CEO
XCalibre Communications Ltd was founded in the UK in 1997 by our CEO Tony Lucas. Now as a long-established ISP with customers all across the globe he is driving a change in focus in the hosting market with a revolutionary new cloud computing product called FlexiScale.
FlexiScale has been created to offer customers pay-as-you-go hosting, processing power and storage on demand with no lock-in, so it’s the perfect solution for start-ups and developers who can’t predict how much bandwidth they’ll need or how soon they’ll need it. FlexiScale really is revolutionary and it’s available now as unmanaged virtual dedicated servers.
What unique selling points do you offer?
As a well established hosting company with a successful 11 year history in such a competitive business, we have a very strong heritage in customer support, so you won’t be subjected to a call centre experience with us. We like our customers to be able to talk directly to our team, often to our most experienced engineers. Operating in an industry that is well known for poor customer service and outsourced call centres, we pride ourselves in directly employing the important people that provide you with phone and email support.
At XCalibre all our departments share the same space, so there's always an expert on hand for customer calls, whatever the question happens to be - billing, admin, technical support, system administration or a development issue. In fact, most of our senior engineers actually came from the ranks of the support team so they know our infrastructure extremely well.
We truly care what you feel and think about our services. This is part of our culture. We can only progress as a company if the people that work on the next generation of products, like our highly innovative FlexiScale, see and hear what our customers feel and think about our services. This always has and always will influence how we do things.
Describe the services you offer?
Web hosting is a business enabler, plain and simple. FlexiScale is more than that though – it’s a simple, affordable, scalable and highly available core infrastructure that lets developers and ISVs focus on their service proposition and not worry about data centres, networks, hardware and operating systems. It’s the way of the future when it comes to hosting.
Describe your target market?
Our target market for FlexiScale is the developer audience, particularly those in the Web 2.0 arena. It includes those who do not want a long-term lock-in, who can’t afford a fully scalable solution or can’t predict future growth. They may also want the ability to switch the platform on/off to match seasonality or other factors. Others will be looking for predictable performance, a solution that can scale automatically, that can fix itself automatically and has an API.
How is your company planning for the future?
Over the next five years we will advance a very aggressive product roadmap to extend our current technology leadership. We will grow our business through strategic partnerships and, to begin with, through a pan-European channel. A core aim is to become a global driver that defines the new way of offering cloud computing.
What benefits can you offer your customers?
As I’ve said already, we love to talk to our customers, so you can talk directly to our engineers – no call centre culture for us! A web developer should also choose us over someone else because FlexiScale from XCalibre will help them get their app to market quickly without worrying about scalability or being locked into an expensive contract. It’s got so many benefits to bring to a developing business - pay-as-you-go hosting, processing power and storage, it supports MS Windows as well as Linux, offers static IP, a 99.99% SLA and access to the API, automatic fail-over in case of a hardware fault and too many others to go into here.
How do you support your customers?
Our support services include everything from knowledge base and FAQs through tutorials, email support and telephone support.
