Picture this. You swing by the neighborhood grocery store to pick up a bottle of wine for dinner only to find that the building isn’t there anymore. It sounds like a merchant’s outlandish nightmare, but the cyberspace equivalent of the above scenario happens to online retailers all the time. The Web site goes off line, and customers go elsewhere.
Internet auction house eBay Inc. grabbed headlines in June when its Web site crashed twice in two days after a botched software upgrade. Wall Street punished the San Jose, Calif.-based company by lopping $47–a quarter of the pre-crash value of eBay shares–off its stock price within days.
Beyond Cash Donations: How New Forms of Giving Are Transforming Not-for-Profit Accounting
Evolving Funding Landscape for Not-for-Profits Not-for-profit organizations are being asked to do more with less,…
Learn More
The company later disclosed that the 22-hour outage cost it $3.9 million in lost revenue, and the auction house may have gotten off lightly compared to an online retailer. The New Jersey consulting firm Contingency Planning Research puts the average cost of down time for an e-commerce company at roughly $2.6 million an hour.
Nearly a third of the server failures that can knock an Internet service provider or an online retailer off line are inflicted by power disturbances, according to a recent study by International Data Corp. of Framingham, Mass.
That’s where American Power Conversion Corp. of West Kingston comes into the picture.
APC is finding its uninterruptible power supply units in great demand among Internet companies striving to keep their Web sites available to customers 99.999 percent of the time. That unforgiving standard, known in the industry as “five nines of availability,” translates into only about five minutes of down time a year.
”The importance of availability has blossomed in our favor in the past year or two,” said Peter Rumsey, vice president of APC’s enterprise solutions group. In the late 1980s, the computer industry focused on protecting costly hardware. But as that hardware became increasingly disposable, Rumsey said, the focus shifted to protecting the great streams of data that had begun to flow across corporate networks.
“Now, with the rise of the Internet and the World Wide Web and electronic commerce across the world,” he added, “we’re actually finding that even more important than the hardware and the data is just plain availability of the systems to, not only the company internally, but its customers.”
Michael Korber, co-owner of the Providence Internet service provider Big Dog Technologies Inc., confirms that power disturbances are the gravest threat to his company’s online availability. “The only time that our servers have been off line is for an extended power failure,” Korber said.
Rumsey’s enterprise solutions group works with clients ranging from basement Internet start-ups to big telephone companies, which he declined to name for competitive reasons, to design power availability systems tailored to their individual needs. And as Internet companies multiply and grow as rapidly as exotic viruses, American Power Conversion, which last year posted more than a billion dollars in revenue for the first time, finds itself in the midst of another full-fledged growth market.
“It’s really a beautiful position for us,” Rumsey said. “We see opportunity as rich as any we’ve ever seen before.”
That’s not to say there isn’t competition. There is. APC’s principal competitors include Exide Electronics Group Inc. of Reading, Pa.; the Best Power unit of Muskegon, Mich.-based SPX Corp.; and others. But APC aims to leverage the strength of its products and the loyalty of its customers to protect and expand its share of the burgeoning electronic commerce market.
As an example of the business opportunity presented by upstart Internet companies, Rumsey cites one such firm that bought an off-the-rack APC uninterruptible power supply last year.
”They had it protecting a server that they had set up in a barn out behind their house,” he said. Six months ago, as the company moved its headquarters out of the barn and into an industrial park, it traded up to one of APC’s brawnier uninterruptible power supply units to protect three servers.
In late September, the same company signed a purchase order for one of APC’s industrial-strength backup power systems, Rumsey said.
It seems the market tarring that eBay suffered this summer after its crash has become a cautionary tale for the fledgling Internet industry.
”Everybody knows that story. Everybody doesn’t want to be in that situation,” Rumsey said of APC’s customers and partners. “They say to us, ‘We don’t want to have an eBay-type situation. Everybody is very sensitive to that.”
So much the better for APC.
