Montreal Tech Watch

I was at an official event last week, where Éric Chouinard, CEO of iWeb Technologies, announced the new iWeb partners, and also at the same time announced what’s upcoming for iWeb.

If you remember well, iWeb announced at the beginning of the year that the company will undergo full privatization, retiring itself from the Toronto Stock Exchange, with shares and stock options being bought by a private equity group.

At last week’s event, Novacap, La Caisse des dépôts, Fonds d’Action CSN, BMO, plus also other actors such as Raymond Chabot Grant Thornton, were unveiled for the first time as the group who were the new business partners of iWeb. The goal of course is to support financially iWeb, and at the same time accelerate iWeb to a $100m hosting company. Éric Chouinard announced they will be taking 100 days to take that new direction.

Also announced was the focus on profitable and growing products of the business, namely virtual dedicated servers. Legacy products such as shared hosting or other business units will be phased out as subsidiaries, or stay in the company, but under a different name.

This is good news on many levels. It’s good that the main investors are from Quebec, it will bring understanding on both sides. Novacap has experience in technology, and their key focus should now be finding the experienced professionnals and executives to help iWeb reach that $100m revenues cap. Hosting can be very profitable but at the same time, a very competitive business.

The focus on virtual servers is also good news. Shared hosting is a product that thousands (if not millions) of businesses offer worldwide, whereas virtual hosting & cloud computing is where the future is (and what customers want).

Congrats to iWeb, and congrats to their new partners!