CAIS Internet Ardent about new name

CAIS Internet is taking steps to stop its sliding stock value and repair its failing business by changing its name to Ardent Communications and focusing its energies as an Internet Service Provider (ISP).

Ardent Communications means CAIS Internet will no longer focus on the hospitality industry, said President/CEO Michael Lee.

“We’re changing the name of the company, because everyone, including Wall Street, associates CAIS with this hotel business,” Lee said.

The hotel business was cost-intensive and profit-restrictive. CAIS picked the costs to install and service the Internet connections and the hotels shared in the revenues, but not the profits.

“A customer connecting into the hotel’s LAN can be very capital intensive and customer-service intensive,” Lee said. “That’s not our core competency.”

The company still will provide high-speed Internet connections for business travelers but will focus on hotels close to convention centers. It also will continue delivering service to hotel business centers, kiosks and convention centers.

Ardent is clearly stepping into the Internet’s murky waters at a time when that’s not a particularly stable place to be.

“The company’s stock was already in the tank before I got here,” Lee said. ”Its hospitality focus wasn’t doing it any good on Wall Street.”

As an ISP, Ardent will have access to a Tier 1 network with a nationwide broadband OC-12 and OC-03 network with 29 points of presence (POPs) serving 38 metropolitan sites. That network is now fully MPLS (MultiProtocol Label Switching) enabled. It was overkill for the hospitality industry, but it’s a solid foundation for serving small and medium-sized business customers, Lee said.

CAIS also purchased a “multimillion-dollar CLEC billing package,” for its hotel business said Peter Benedict, Ardent’s senior vice president of marketing communications. It will now use that capability as an ISP.

“We can actually manage VPNs on usage. That will enable us to actually offer customers packages for managed services,” he said.