ONE man who firmly believes he can operate in this hostile market is Tim Longton.

Business Serve’s technical director is responsible for making sure the company’s latest investment in Salford Quays brings home the brass.

The company, based in Lancaster, has bought Internet hosting facilities and will offer co-location space to firms wanting to outsource IT capacity and services.

It is now looking to virtually double its staff by recruiting 150 at the Salford Quays site, with positions available for IT specialists and administrators as well as technical and sales staff.

Business Serve currently hosts 40,000 web sites for over 25,000 small and medium sized firms and has a turnover of £8m.

The new facilities will give it one of the biggest Internet Service Provider capacities in Britain - the deal means it will have the ability to host more than 150,000 major web sites.

Current clients include Audi, Volkswagen, Ericsson, Nintendo, Umbro, Cadbury, Bloomsbury, BSkyB and Airtours.

‘Grow with demand’

And 37-year-old Tim is upbeat that the new Salford Quays site can bring the company further success.

‘‘A lot of companies have struggled because they’ve jumped in and invested in the sort of equipment they’d need to serve 1,000 customers without having those customers,’’ he said.

‘‘As it is, we have the space here and we have the foundations, but we can grow with the demand put upon us.

‘‘There have been casualties and we want to pick up the pieces from those. It would be easy to say ‘Lets have a thousand racks in here and fill them all with kit’, but that’s not what we’re going to do.

Caution

‘‘It’s true to say that things have changed from the early days and bigger companies are more cautious and some want to keep control by keeping their equipment in the vicinity of their premises.

‘‘But what we can offer is the sort of reliability of service that you can’t get without an infrastructure like this.’’

At the heart of the site at Salford Quays is a high-grade ISP facility surrounded by numerous suites with the capacity for hundreds of servers. Every part of the ISP system is duplicated so that if one fails the other can kick in.

Stored in a fireproofed, air conditioned room, the £2m hub could immediately take 150,000 users on operating systems including UNIX, Solaris and Windows NT.

‘‘Every aspect of the reliability of the ISP has been made fail safe,’’ Tim explains.

The fibre links to the Internet are via two diverse cables far enough apart so that if a JCB digs one of them up the other one will still be up and running.

‘‘We’ve thought of everything because we’re here to stay.’’