Hostway buys OpenLink

American company Hostway, one of the leading global providers of web hosting services, has bought OpenLink, a Romanian web page development firm.
OpenLink was founded by Flaviu Radulescu, 26, one of the local entrepreneurs who believed in the development of the Internet six years ago.
The value of the transaction exceeded 600,000 euros, Flaviu Radulescu told ZIARUL FINANCIAR. After the deal, he became research and development manager of Hostway Lab Romania, the research and development centre of the US-based company in Romania.
Hostway has bought another two web hosting companies over the past six months, investing a total of over one million euros, OpenLink included.
The Americans will establish an R&D centre through OpenLink and will develop a regional centre of operations in Romania.
OpenLink was set up in 2001 by Radulescu, who was employed by an IT retail company back then. OpenLink posted 200,000-euro turnover last year and is currently employing 11 people. Radulescu left the company he worked for the moment he was told he was too young to take care of the company’s Internet site. After a number of smaller projects he got to work for BRD, Diverta, Neoset, Ericsson Telecommunication, RDS and Best Computers, developing their respective web pages.
“Whereas we have been doing website development until now, with the arrival of Hostway we will be focusing on research and development of products and services for Internet. We will become the biggest such centre inside Hostway in one year and intend to have more than 100 employees by the same time,” Radulescu added. Hostway has R&D centres in Korea, India and Canada.
Radulescu believes Romania does not necessary have much better trained people to offer than the US; they are, however, easier to find in this country. “I’ve seen extremely well trained people in America, but they are harder to find and expensive over there,” Radulescu said. “Anyway, my job now is to build this team. I don’t need technical people, but rather curious and loyal people,” Radulescu added.
Hostway entered the domestic market in February, at which time it took over Ims Soft& Services, a company that provided data and web hosting. The deal was worth upwards of 500,000 euros, Marius Ion, 28, general manager of Hostway Romania, told ZIARUL FINANCIAR. Hostway Romania will become the regional centre of operations for the parent company, with the countries co-ordinated by Marius Ion set to include Bulgaria, Hungary, Turkey, the Ukraine and Serbia.
Hostway Romania also bought Top Hosting in April, a company that hosts approximately 3,000 websites, using more than ten servers in Romania and in the US. “The amount was nothing spectacular; the decision to buy was made because of the over 3,000-customer portfolio Top Hosting had,” Ion explained.
He estimated the turnover of Hostway Romania will reach 1.5m euros this year, and the number of employees will go up from 47 at the moment to 100 by yearend. “We will invest five million euros over the next five years, and I estimate the turnover in the same period of time will amount to 20m euros,” Ion stated.