The book on Exodus

Want to know Ellen Hancock's biggest fear for Exodus Communications? That it's not losing enough bids to host other people's data. "We win most of the bids we put out," says Hancock, Exodus' president and CEO. "That tells me we're not trying for enough contracts."

Not that Exodus' customers or stockholders are complaining. The data competitive local exchange carrier and complex Web hosting company has just announced its third stock split of 1999 - its first year as a public company. Exodus just posted third quarter revenues that were up 59% over the previous quarter and up 367% over third quarter 1998.

The company also has been on a building binge. Exodus currently has 15 Internet data centers and plans to build four more, totaling approximately 1.5 million square feet of capacity.

And Exodus' energy is reflected in the woman at its helm. Hancock spent 29 years at IBM, becoming senior vice president of its network hardware division before leaving in 1995 to become chief operating officer of National Semiconductor. She swapped that post for that of chief technical officer at Apple Computer in 1996, then moved to Exodus in 1998.

The company started out hosting data and services for Internet solutions companies. Then the Web went ballistic and e-commerce became a household word. Now Exodus' client list reads like a game plan for dot-com domination: eBay, Nordstrom, Lycos, Yahoo!, NBC, Fox News and Sports, USA Today.

But the future may lie in corporations as consumers - of Web-hosted software applications. Exodus has no intention of becoming an application service provider (ASP), but it will happily provide the back-end services for ASPs such as Corio and Oracle Business Online.

"The person who's producing the next release knows best what's in it and can do the best job of dealing with the customer," Hancock says.

Is she worried by the entry of large interexchange carriers to the data-hosting market? Not a bit. "We're not demand-constrained," Hancock says. "I try not to be ignorant of the fact that Intel is big and building data centers and so is AT&T and so is Qwest [Communications]. That's all fine - but I'm still worried about not having enough data centers."