I have to speak up at this point after sitting on my hands and keeping
my mouth shut thus far in this thread.
Speaking from my own experience, the success of our company stems
directly from what OpenSRS does not offer. Why? Because thats
what we do, we add the value and thus we justify the mark-up.
Now we have spent a lot of time, effort and money developing our
systems, infrastructure and support mechansims to do just this.
In fact, we have often said that when you consider the end-to-end
functionality of domain name management, registration is the easy
part, and what we specialize in (managed DNS) is the hard part.
The last thing we want to see is OpenSRS opening the door for a
bunch of RSP's who don't have the technical expertise in-house
to provide our services to enter our market. Not because this puts
us in competition with all those RSPs, but because this puts us
in competition with OpenSRS (leave out for the moment that we
already do compete with OpenSRS in .CA)
We've found our relationship with OpenSRS very beneficial and as
we enter our fourth year of business we plan on this continuing,
but if we wake up one morning and OpenSRS RSP's can suddenly offer
URL forwarding, email forwarding and DNS management without lifting
a finger themselves to do it, well then our relationship with OpenSRS
hits a new juncture.
There are other services OpenSRS can introduce which do not raise these
issues, the most likely one is already here, web certs. Now here is an
industry segment just waiting to be taken because the established players
are overpriced (Verisign, Thawte) or inept (Equifaxsecure) and the cert
player OpenSRS has teamed up with (Entrust) is from my brief experience
in dealing with them, both helpful and clueful.
So there is nice large market sitting there that is a perfect compliment
for a high percentage of RSP's (whose core value add is often web
hosting), which is dominated by overpriced, complacent or incompetent
companies, with little barrier to entry and enough room for some quite
healthy margins (an easy 50% markup at 149.99) and not many RSP's seem
to be jumping on it.
Ask yourself this: if OpenSRS starts offering all the extra services,
like URL forwarding and web hosting, then what will they need RSP's
for?
Think about it.
-mark
--
mark jeftovic
http://www.easydns.com
http://mark.jeftovic.net
