Joint-venture agreement between Netcast and Colt Telecom for the provision of hosting services (2000)

Netcast is one of the pioneers in the Dutch market for internet consultancy. The company made its name with the construction and continuous upgrading of the Postbank website. Netcast long provided site hosting services under its own management. Apart from the basic publication of the site on the web, it also offered a full range of additional services. These varied from standardised backup and maintenance services to site availability and performance guarantees as well as statistical analyses of site performance and visitor numbers.

The rapid professionalisation of the market for basic hosting services compelled Netcast in 2000 to look for a partner who was able to take over this task. Apart from supplying a data centre, fully equipped server racks and bandwidth, the candidate was also to partner the joint marketing of a combined service comprising the entire range of services that Netcast originally offered on its own. In the new set-up, this combined service was to be provided on the basis of an internal division of tasks between Netcast and its partner.

An extensive market scan led to Colt Telecom, then the only player which, like Netcast, was seeking a complementary party to broaden its range of services. Colt Telecom is the only telecom operator with its own optical fibre infrastructure in a large number of European business centres. Bridgecraft acted in this project on behalf of Netcast.