The Planet Reports First Quarter Results

(The Hosting News) – The Planet, the global leader in IT hosting, today discussed its results for the quarter ended March 31, 2010. The Planet provides quarterly updates to its customers, business partners and prospects with information relative to new initiatives and its progress.

“We ended the first quarter with encouraging results that included increased revenue and EBITDA beyond 30%,” said Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Douglas J. Erwin. “We launched the year with an entirely new focus on delivering customer value, coupled with the declaration of being first-to-market with the latest processors for our customers. The upper end of our business continues to grow at double-digit rates, and the managed hosting business is making great strides and hitting its revenue targets. We’re encouraged by participation in our cloud computing beta program, which we expect to launch this quarter.

“Ultimately, operational excellence represents the best barometer on our performance. We’re continuing to raise the bar with the goal of providing the best performance and customer service across the board for our customers.”

“We had another solid quarter, with our virtual rack and managed hosting offerings performing very well across all geographies,” said Chief Financial Officer Kevin Klausmeyer. “Our business outside of North America continues to be impressive, with strong year-over-year revenue growth in Brazil, China, Russia, Denmark and the Czech Republic. Our current deal pipeline is very strong, with more ‘large deals’ being worked than we have seen in the company’s history. The balance sheet remains healthy, with net debt below half of our trailing twelve months of EBITDA.”

First Quarter Highlights
Complex Infrastructure Growth: The company’s complex infrastructure solutions, which include virtual and private racks, experienced double-digit growth year-over-year, continuing to make them the fastest-growing products in the portfolio.

New Servers: The company announced its goal to be first-to-market on key server technologies that enable customers with high performance. The Planet was the first hosting provider to make available the Dell PowerEdge R710 server, equipped with the Intel® Xeon® X5600 series processor and built on its next-generation Westmere microarchitecture. The company also added two entry-level, value-priced servers equipped with the new Dell Intel Pentium G6950 processor.

New Pricing Reductions: The Planet announced price reductions across its product portfolio to
affirm its value leadership position. From domestic and international servers in London, to CDNs, bandwidth, services, and hard drive and RAM upgrades, the company lowered pricing and took deliberate steps that enable customers to extract more value from their hosting investments. Prices
were reduced from 7 to 30 percent, while RAM and hard drives were reduced by 50 percent.

Enhanced Reseller Program: The company announced sweeping enhancements to its Partner Plus Program for resellers and extended its leadership position as a preferred hosting platform. Partners can take advantage of volume discounts up to 20 percent, depending on monthly order value, and new server bundles optimized for resellers. The Planet also added Commission Junction (http://www.cj.com) to its affiliate network.

Network Investments: The company outlined plans to spend more than $7 million to enhance the network infrastructure in Houston and Dallas. The capital investments include network capacity upgrades, expanded infrastructure for Private and Virtual Rack solutions, new routers and switches, and robust test platforms to evaluate custom solutions. To increase network resilience and capacity, the company plans to double the number of 10 Gig-E links connecting its data centers with its Internet Service Providers. Also planned are capacity and functionality upgrades to meet the unprecedented traffic utilization demands of its colocation and managed hosting customers.

iPhone Mobile Application: The company launched a new mobile iPhone application expressly designed to make it easy for customers to connect to the company’s Orbit customer portal. In its first iteration, the application enables customers to view and manage support tickets; monitor server ping status; reboot servers; power servers on and off; and initiate operating system reloads. Customers are also able to review bandwidth utilization graphs, and track recent invoice data.

Customer Features: The company launched two new customer videos featuring Colorado-based AttainResponse (http://www.attainresponse.com) and Venali (http://www.venali.com),

headquartered in Miami. AttainResponse develops and manages content delivery applications, including text and video e-mail, e-mail marketing and streaming video hosting. Internet messaging provider Venali, Inc., with offices in the United Kingdom, Germany and Singapore, provides desktop and production fax solutions – including fax to e-mail conversion services – that streamline sending, receiving and managing fax communications.

Sand Castle: To eliminate technology costs and help individuals and entrepreneurs with great ideas and visions, the company launched the Sand Castle project. For one year, individual developers and entrepreneurs will receive one server for developing new applications and products. The Sand Castle program includes up to 500 servers.

Expanded Tradeshow Schedule: The company expanded its 2010 tradeshow schedule, with planned participation in 17 industry events. In the first quarter, The Planet participated in two shows: South by Southwest (SXSW) Interactive, where it was selected to engage in the Iron Geek Triathlon, and Channel Partners, designed to showcase its growing partner program.

About The Planet
The Planet is the leading provider of On Demand IT Infrastructure solutions, hosting more than 18,000 small- and medium-size businesses and 12 million Web sites worldwide. Customers have the power to choose from the broadest range of hosting solutions in the industry, from dedicated servers, Managed Dedicated Servers, Managed Hosting and data center colocation, all backed by 24×7×365 support. With the best choice of servers, software tools and world-class service, backed by state-of-the-art data centers and an enterprise-class network, The Planet turns IT into a powerful competitive advantage that enables customers to grow their businesses. For additional information, visit http://www.theplanet.com.

The Planet Reports First Quarter Results

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