Rob Avery had installed and maintained enough expensive networks in tiny offices that he began thinking that there had to be a better way to deliver computing power to small firms.
His company, Avery Communications of Reno, spent two years developing what he considers to be a better answer a server farm that targets companies with 10 or fewer computer users.
Now Avery needs to discover if users are willing to set aside a long-standing bias in favor of on-site servers and give his off-site server farm a look.
There's nothing particularly new about the concept.
A centralized location with multiple servers eight at the moment for Avery Communications provides computing power for numerous small businesses.
The linked servers back up one another and balance the load so that users aren't hung up when one server gets many requests.
Users, who make an Internet connection from their desk to the server farm, don't see any difference between a server at a centralized location and a server tucked in a closet down the hall in their office.
But for the folks who administer the network, there's a world of difference.
"People in this industry often think small businesses are a nuisance,"Avery says.
Rather than send technicians to travel from office to office to resolve server problems, Avery Communications can deal with customer requests at a centralized location.
Avery believes his company currently is alone in targeting small companies as users of a server farm.
But he's certain that competition will develop in short order, and his company needs to move quickly to nail down market share early.
"But we need to do it right at the same time," he says.
The sales challenge,Avery says, is overcoming the desire of customers to keep their data at their own location and convincing them that a server farm is secure.
Two backup locations as well as mirrorimage hard drives in the server farm should help potential users see the advantages of an off-site location, he says, while Avery Communications put much of its two years of development into working out firewalls and other security systems.
Avery acknowledges that the server farm might cannibalize the four-year-old company's current list of small-business customers.
"If I'm providing improved service, and I don't have to out there in their offices, then I'm serving the client better," he says.
