E-Mail This Article Printer-Friendly Version

By Steve Horton
iProduction

St. Paul, MN – January 2, 2003 – iProduction has partnered with high-speed network provider Enventis Telecom to create a new iProduction data center in Edina, Minnesota. The new data center houses five separate web hosting systems, hundreds of web and email servers, air cleaning systems, back-up power systems, and 24-hour security.

“It’s a good time for us to add capacity,” said iProduction president Stephen M. Laliberte. “We’ve added several new clients, so the demand picture is clear. Plus, the companies we buy systems from are more competitive than they were during the tech boom.”

Laliberte said his clients, news and information publishing companies, are using much of the new capacity for delivering news via email. “People who subscribe to publications want to know right away when something big happens,” Laliberte said. “That’s why our publishing clients want more email capacity…it’s the ideal medium for breaking news.”

Laliberte said most of iProduction’s business comes from small and medium-sized publishers. “Smaller publishers want full-featured web sites like large publishers have, but without the high cost,” he said. Large publishers with internal web departments often spend in the millions each year on web systems, Laliberte said.

iProduction is a privately held Minnesota company located at 3570 Lexington Avenue in St. Paul. The company is an application service provider (ASP), meaning that publishing companies who use iProduction systems pay monthly usage fees rather than buying the systems outright. iProduction also licenses its software to publishers who can reduce overhead by hosting many web sites on a single publishing system. The company’s clients include newsletters, magazines, industry journals, and newspapers. Laliberte founded iProduction in 1994. The company employs 11 people.

Enventis Telecom, based in Minneapolis, provides high-speed Internet and networking services to businesses and telecommunications resellers. The company’s Cisco-powered network provides very high-speed, self-healing connections. Enventis is one of the few single-source networking providers that can connect to any location in the world.

Enventis operates a SONET-based network. SONET is an ANSI standard that stands for synchronous optical network. SONET-based networks are highly valued because they enable many different types of communication formats to be transmitted over a single line. The SONET standard streamlines the systems required to operate the network and results in much greater reliability and bandwidth.

Enventis Telecom is owned by ALLETE (NYSE:ALE), an energy company headquartered in Duluth, MN. ALLETE operates Minnesota Power, an electric utility that serves 150,000 residential and industrial customers in Minnesota and Wisconsin.