Host with the most people

Greetings," John Charters recently told a class of seniors majoring in computer information systems at Colorado State University. "My job is to eliminate your jobs."

Far from inciting general chaos, the prospect of hosting applications over the Web created a feeding frenzy for Charters' business card. "By the time I finished, they all were asking, `Are you guys hiring?'" he says. Qwest Cyber.Solutions is indeed hiring, in expectation that by the end of 2000, it will need almost double the 500 IT employees it has now. The company thinks its ability to draw good people in good numbers will help differentiate it from the hordes of other application service providers (ASPs).

Last June, Qwest Communications announced the joint venture with professional consulting firm KPMG that created Qwest Cyber.Solutions. Qwest's 18,000-mile fiber network - on which Cyber.Solutions can buy transport at the most favorable rates - is a big plus. So are the 1.8 million square feet of space that Qwest will operate once it finishes construction on its 14 data centers.

"But the No. 1 value driver is that IT resources are hard to find, hire and retain," Charters says. "At the end of the day, you're selling your customers trust - trust that you can support their applications the way they would have."

Charters knows what it's like to start an applications host from scratch. At U S West, he worked on building computer systems that monitored the networks. "I was there for 13 years, but always on the data side - I can't provision a telephone to save my life," he jokes. When frame relay hit the scene and the Internet showed signs of growing beyond the back rooms at Berkeley, Charters was instrumental in creating U S West's !nteract business ISP. Under that moniker, he started a program hosting Lotus Notes over the Internet, his first foray into hosted applications - "not a rockin' success" in his estimation.

He finally concluded that RBOCs could not host applications because of their regional reach and jumped to Qwest. Even before the joint venture announcement, Charters was striking deals with the likes of Oracle and Microsoft. "To succeed as an ASP, you need a cooperative relationship with your software partners," he says. "That means creating an app that's network friendly [and] developing solutions and templates for delivery in an [IP] environment, including marketing, sales and resource support."