The Planet Acquires Touch Support
May 21, 2008 by Kevin Hazard, Web Hosting Evangelist in The Planet
Pass out the cigars. Raise your champagne glass. Make some room in the car. The Planet’s family just got a little bigger. Today, we’ve announced the addition of Touch Support to our team!
Welcome, Touch Support!
Because this news may be a surprise to some, I thought I’d answer a few of the most common questions we expect to hear.
What is Touch Support?
Touch Support is a leading provider of server administration management services. Those “Advanced Services” perfectly compliment The Planet’s unmanaged dedicated hosting solutions by providing our customers with specific server management options like 24/7 monitoring, managed backups, and outsourced technical support, so the inclusion of Touch Support’s team is a natural progression in The Planet’s evolution as the best, most complete hosting provider in the industry.
Why Touch Support?
We’ve seen an incredible demand for additional hosting services from our customers via our forums, at conferences and in regular ticket/call correspondence. Touch Support’s services are based on proven practices and processes, so their expertise can be leveraged to scale those services to our entire customer base.
The complexity of IT infrastructure continues to grow, as does the cost for small- and medium-sized businesses to use these services to maximize their businesses. With this acquisition, we expect to provide our customers with the ability to select from a comprehensive portfolio of advanced services to help them better manage their dedicated servers.
What’s Next?
We plan to make an announcement about our Advanced Services portfolio during the third quarter of this year. It will take a little time to integrate our two companies, so stay tuned. We’ll let you know when we’re ready to announce these offerings.
May 22nd, 2008 at 2:08 pm
Sounds great. Congratulations to both companies.
I have a question since I don’t seem to be getting most out of it and that is: would we be needing not (in most cases perhaps) any outsourced network admin services and such after this acquisition? and would the price of the existing customers/packages be raised once the integration process is over? Okay that were two questions
May 26th, 2008 at 7:09 am
Whats next? The Planet offering VPS accounts and Hosting to clients directly. I though The Planet was a network/hardware company and it seems their steps are more to a webhost. So what do they need us then?
Touchsupport managed to break my server in minutes.
I dont understand why a hardware company must enter the direct arena of what there customers are suppose to do. I guess they will not need hosting companies anytime soon anymore since they will host end clients directly. Another reason to start a colocation provider or a company that doesnt try to compete directly against the ones that made then big (the clients)
Signs
The ex clients
Probably are going to join the TP ex staff too.
May 28th, 2008 at 9:23 am
The Planet is not in the market of providing promoting and signing new VPS and Shared Hosting solutions. Touch Support is a highly-regarded advanced services provider, and because we are interested in continually building and improving the knowledge of our support representatives and their services, Touch Support was a natural fit for The Planet.
The intent of this strategic business move is not to cannibalize business from our current customers, rather to provide additional services that we previously have not had available.
The Planet is at its very root a customer service company that happens to own data centers, a network and servers. A hardware company would be a vendor like Dell or Cisco or Foundry.
Web hosting resellers make up a significant proportion of our customer base, and if you check out Touch Support’s services, you’ll note that they provide services to resellers (rather than reselling themselves).
May 28th, 2008 at 6:05 pm
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