Interviewed on 3 Sep 10
Todd Abrams, President and Founder
Todd Abrams is the president and founder of Layered Technologies, a global provider of managed dedicated hosting, on-demand virtualization/cloud computing and Web services.
What unique selling points do you offer?
Delivering superior levels of value, vision, expertise, choice and flexibility is at the heart of our business. We realize that not every business has the same needs, which is why we first learn about our customers’ business goals and then provide counsel to develop a tailored solution set.
We knew early on that the key to our success would be giving customers the widest choice possible for virtualization and dedicated hosting offerings, while maintaining high reliability. Layered Tech customers can select from the largest virtual private data center to the smallest slice on a dedicated server.
Across our suite of services, we make it easy for customers to focus on managing their success, not their servers – to focus on hard results, not hardware. For both virtualization/cloud computing and dedicated server solutions, customers can choose tiered managed services to select the level of security, support, monitoring and specialized software that they need, ranging from fully managed by Layered Tech to self-managed options with varying levels in between.
Describe the services you offer?
Layered Tech provides businesses with infrastructure solutions to best fit their core business needs. Our broad suite of services range from managed dedicated hosting to virtualization/cloud computing and Web services.
Customers can choose from a full range of dedicated server solutions with the broadest choice of operating systems, control panels and databases in the industry. We can create the solution that’s right for each business – whether it is a Fortune 1000 enterprise or a startup. Our dedicated server solutions are built around high-performance Dell and HP servers housed in seven top-tier data centers around the world.
Our new Virtual Machine (VM) offering is unique in that it provides high-performance, high-availability computing resources that are not confined to a single, vulnerable server. We implement the customer’s site or application across many nodes. So customers can take advantage of our highly reliable and secure data center facilities and easily scale to meet evolving business needs. This offering also includes managed support, which is unique in the industry. Virtual Machines are an ideal entry level solution for people who are new to hosting, owners of smaller websites, and software developers seeking a test bed.
We also offer virtual private data center (VPDC) and virtual machine solutions with unprecedented processing power, bandwidth, storage capacity and on-demand scalability, and our technology-agnostic lineup means each business can customize their virtualization platform. We recently developed a new virtual private data center (VPDC) platform that delivers a virtualized environment on servers dedicated to individual enterprise customers. Customers using the new platform will receive levels of managed services, security and flexibility via a proprietary API previously unavailable in an integrated offering. To meet constantly changing enterprise needs, the virtualized platform gives customers the reliability and security of dedicated servers with the flexibility and scalability of virtual machines.
Describe your target market?
Our clients range from leading-edge Web 2.0 startups, SMBs, successful mid-sized enterprises, and some of the world’s largest consultancy and integration firms. Our infrastructure powers millions of Web sites and Internet-enabled applications, including e-commerce, software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and content distribution.
How is your company planning for the future?
We will continue to provide businesses with innovative technology, greater choice and flexibility to truly meet their hosted infrastructure needs. As Layered Tech moves upstream into the larger enterprise space, we want to continue delivering the highest quality customer support and provide top-tier infrastructure solutions so customers can experience the successes they desire. To achieve this goal, we will continue our cloud/virtualization innovation and deepen our relationships with key players in this space, including Microsoft, Dell, Cisco, 3Tera and VMware. We also are enhancing our Partner Program to offer our resellers more resources and marketing and sales tools at their fingertips. We’ve dedicated significant resources to automating both internal processes and customer-facing platforms, and customers can expect more automation in the future.
What benefits can you offer your customers?
Layered Tech is committed to helping customers reduce capital and operating costs and free up internal resources for their core business, and we are continually looking for innovative strategies and processes to further support our customers.
Our automated platform removes time-intensive manual processes of provisioning servers so Layered Tech team members can focus more time on using their skills to develop new and advanced service offerings and provide unmatched hands-on customer support. Customers who take advantage of our rapid deployment options view server availability in real-time and can have their servers up and running within 30 minutes rather than the industry standard of 48 to 72 hours. We’ve extended our automation platform to our private cloud services so customers can have their virtual machines and private cloud services provisioned within 60-90 minutes, delivering added efficiency that we know our customers need.
It is important that companies re-evaluate their infrastructure and business needs before choosing any solution. For example, putting everything on the cloud is not necessarily the best option; a more holistic approach of combining virtual machines and dedicated servers may better accommodate certain business needs. At Layered Tech, we consult with each customer to create and tailor its infrastructure solution to best meet its needs and deliver added business value.
How do you support your customers?
Our tiered managed services offer five calibrated service bundles for customers to choose the level of support they need. Higher levels include 24/7 telephone support, priority technical support and a service level agreement that ensures response to customer issues in two hours or less.
Our enhanced Pentagon customer portal is a powerful centralized management system for customer support, upgrades, hardware information and invoicing.
Customers look to Layered Tech for a knowledgeable balance of responsible innovation and rock-solid hosting reliability. As the market continues to evolve, Layered Tech will be there for its customers every step, helping them find the best foundation to support their business goals.
