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Any sane, lunchbox-toting assembly line worker at 900 S. Broadway in Denver circa 1950 would have called you absurd if you tried to tell him what has now replaced the chrome hubs and car engines in the building. Once home to a Ford Model T factory, HOSTING Denver N+1 data center now uses the historic Broadway facility to securely host data and processing in the virtual cloud.
It may have been gibberish to assembly line workers in the 1950s, but recent data breaches at Target and now Neiman Marcus underscore the importance of companies like HOSTING, a leading managed cloud services provider. As commerce and knowledge increasingly migrate to the cloud, security is vital to preserve the integrity and secrecy of data that underlies our fundamental concepts of privacy, identity and ownership.
HOSTING’s CEO, Art Zeile knows a thing or two about security and the cloud. Zeile was an Air Force officer, executive officer to the Director for Military Communications Programs and technical advisor to the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff and he has 22 years of IT services experience under his belt.
Zeile said he thinks the key experience that shaped his career as a CEO was being the Executive Officer for a General in the Air Force.
“I was kind of like [the General’s] Chief of Staff in an organization- with 150 people building a massive communications satellite system with multiple contractors and tens of thousands of people,” Zeile said. “Watching the General’s leadership style day to day taught me what it meant to lead a large-scale organization.”
From there, San Francisco-based Automation Group took a risk on him as a program manager for a software development team, even though he didn’t really have a background in software programming. Previous to that he was in the satellite world, working as an astronomical engineer, which was very mechanical, “figuring out how to burn fuel inside of a cone and almost the opposite of bits and bytes in the software world,” Zeile said. “That was my transition to understanding technology, the internet and Silicon Valley world.”
Under Zeile’s leadership, HOSTING has become extraordinarily successful and has earned a place among Denver’s top medium-sized companies to work for. While it doesn’t hurt to have a little experience in the Air, a unique value proposition and a little experience as a program manager for a software development team in Silicon Valley, Zeile insists that the key to success in cloud hosting comes down to wowing your customer, every single day.
HOSTING does this by aligning every single aspect of its strategy with customer satisfaction: Zeile and his executive team even have coined the unique Wow! program to communicate the goal of “wowing” the customer every single day across the entire organization.
Furthermore, HOSTING includes customers in its product development initiatives. They build “customer-enabled” product teams that consist of not only architects and programmers but also 10 to 20 different customers. Twenty top customers are also included in an annual Voice to the Customer conference to develop new strategic initiatives.
Finally, bonus incentives are 100 percent aligned with the company’s Net Promoter Score (NPS) at HOSTING. NPS is a customer satisfaction measurement tool based on a theory proposed by business strategist Fred Reichheld in 2003 in the Harvard Business Review. The theory is that the single most important question to customers is, “How likely on a scale of one to ten are you to recommend my business to a colleague or friend?”
“Last year we set a target of 58 and we achieved a score of 62, literally the best score in the industry,” Zeile said. “We’re very proud of that and very proud of the fact that our customers vote on our bonus.”
As far as making employees happy, Zeile said that employees know a business has to make a profit and they want to feel good about their relationship to the customer.
Aside from a comprehensive customer focus, HOSTING also has another ace in the hole: the Ford Model T factory is retrofitted with state-of-the-art security and power generation to “support mission-critical” applications. Mission critical applications include those related to e-commerce, healthcare and software. Unlike some of the early-stage cloud apps that companies like Amazon Cloud support, these apps must run 24/7, 365 days a year.
Most recently, HOSTING has developed a proprietary service to facilitate new Health Information Privacy and Accountability Act (HIPPA) regulations that mandate a much more diligent approach to the protection of data in the healthcare environment, as the industry migrates toward online collection of patients’ personal information.
“We are creating a solution that is kind of HIPAA-in-a-box,” Zeile said. If customers choose HOSTING, they will automatically be compliant with HIPAA.
All these new solutions that bring increasingly more customers to HOSTING are a result of the supportive Colorado tech community; Zeile said he encourages aspiring tech startup entrepreneurs in Colorado to take advantage of Startup Week and all of the other technology incubators that now give the ability to connect and cross-pollinate.
“Talk to as many entrepreneurs and technology professionals as possible. The more people you can connect with, the more interesting ideas you can bring into your own domain,” Zeile said. “Load up your schedule.”
