Aperian comes to town…
Monday, August 24 marked the Atlanta debut of Aperian, a leading
provider of managed services and scalable bandwidth for content-
intensive e-businesses. Atlanta is Aperian's fourth data center
location. The company, headquartered in Austin, has established the
first independent data centers that are physically located directly
on the GTE and MCI Worldcom Tier-1 Internet backbones.
The nice folks at Aperian marked the Grand Opening by hosting a
luncheon downtown at the Omni. Ken Brasch, (general manager of the
Tampa office) greeted me upon my arrival. After serving myself at
the buffet line, I sat between Cathy Woolard (Atlanta city
councilmember and former marketing director for iVillage) and Glenn
Birk, (Aperian's vice president, sales). City Councilmembers C.T.
Martin and Doug Alexander were also in attendance.
Aperian's Atlanta general manager Eric Malone served as emcee of
the event, introducing CEO Robert Gibbs, who spoke of the company's
place as the Internet goes from "discretionary" to "mission
critical" He called Aperian "the FedEx of the Internet world," as
they help get information from one place to another in a reliable
environment, "delivering all enablements." He spoke of their
decision to have Atlanta as an early site, their first major
metropolitan market, in order to "be where the action is."
Hans Gant (Metro Atlanta Chamber of Commerce senior vice president
of economic development) then spoke, welcoming Aperian to town,
saying that its presence helps "validate our goal to have Atlanta
recognized as a major technology center." Councilmember Cathy
Woolard also made welcoming remarks.
After the lunch, attendees boarded a bus to visit the impressive
world class data center, designed to be fully redundant,
alleviating any single point of failure. Almost as impressive as
the data center were the tchotchkes—a pen, a journal, a shirt, a
coffee mug, a mousepad, and several other take-aways. After the
tour, we returned to the Omni for coffee and cake.
Opt-In to This
Check out Screen4me.com which has now been officially launched. The
new Atlanta start-up offers unique "opt-in/opt-out services"—surely
a necessity for busy folks like us.
Others leaving town…
Two of eHatchery's investments seem to be no longer. The official
word is that SimplyCollectible is reorganizing and not accepting
new orders, while figleaves.com has been acquired by Easyshop.com
and will no longer be headquartered in the US.
Word on the street has it that another Atlanta-based start-up (that
will remain nameless but who has appeared in this column on several
occasions) is also no more—at least for the time being. While its
demise is not yet official, it has been said that its entire staff
was recently laid off. Independent sources confirm, but add "no
one's suppose to know that yet."
If you have information on Atlanta news and events, send it to me
