Hosting Providers See Price Wars as Biggest Business Threat

RESTON, VA--(Marketwire - Aug 15, 2012) - Hosting providers that do not differentiate themselves via value-added services see themselves locked into a destructive pricing race to the bottom, according to research from IT operations and cloud management solutions provider ScienceLogic^™ Inc. In a survey of HostingCon 2012 attendees, nearly 50 percent name "price wars" as the greatest threat to the industry. Competition from large cloud providers, such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Facebook and Google, comes in a distant second, with only 39 percent of respondents naming it as a threat.

Hosting service providers perceive factors other than price as the best way to differentiate their offerings while continuing to grow their business. Almost 60 percent cited management and support as the main way to differentiate from competitors as opposed to price, while only 34 percent cited price as a strategy to differentiate from the competition.

"Hosting companies know they have to fight against industry-wide pricing pressure that commoditizes their offerings. They have already begun to offer value-added services, such as advanced, proactive management and superior support to differentiate themselves and win in this space," said Antonio Piraino, CTO at ScienceLogic. "The biggest opportunity we see is around managed application offerings. From our daily conversations with service providers, we know that the smart way to compete is to offer value-added services higher up the stack, and likely requiring a newer set of management tools."

Other survey highlights include:

• 46 percent of respondents say they have no plans to use any integrated stacks, which included VCE, UCS or OpenStack.
• Only 1 in 6 see "Big Bad Wolf" AWS (Amazon Web Services) as their biggest competitor, while Rackspace and SoftLayer are top of mind when it comes to competition.

For the full survey report, please visit http://www.sciencelogic.com/resources/white-paper/sciencelogic-survey-hosting-providers.

Supporting Resources:

• Infographic 1 - How Do Hosters Stand Out?: http://www.sciencelogic.com/differentiation.jpg
• Infographic 2 - Hosting Industry Threat Levels: http://www.sciencelogic.com/threat_level.jpg
• ScienceLogic Platform: http://www.sciencelogic.com/product
• ScienceLogic Cloud Management: http://www.sciencelogic.com/product/capabilities/cloud-monitoring
• ScienceLogic Application Performance Management: http://www.sciencelogic.com/product/technologies/application
• Read the ScienceLogic Blog: http://blog.sciencelogic.com/
• Follow ScienceLogic on Twitter: @ScienceLogic
• Like ScienceLogic on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/ScienceLogic
• Request a ScienceLogic Demo: http://www.sciencelogic.com/demo

About ScienceLogic
The standard for centralized, "Smart IT" operations and dynamic cloud management across any mix of data center and cloud environments, ScienceLogic enables service providers and enterprises to improve IT efficiency as well as deliver differentiated service offerings. The ScienceLogic platform unites and correlates critical IT functions and data to provide a constantly updated, actionable view of business service delivery. In contrast to legacy tools, ScienceLogic pre-integrates event, fault, availability, performance and asset management, as well as service desk and runbook automation, in a single product. The platform is easily extended to manage both existing and emerging technologies and applications, making it a solid foundation for the fluidity of modern IT environments.

ScienceLogic is a selected Network Management Module in the Cisco Smart Business Architecture; Registered Developer in the Cisco Developer Network Program; certified by VCE as Vblock Ready; certified as VMware Ready and a VMware Elite Technology Alliance Partner; Dell Independent Software Vendor partner; NetApp Platinum Elite Partner.

ScienceLogic is a trademark of ScienceLogic Inc. in the United States and other countries. Other company, product and service marks may be trademarks or service marks of others.