Brighthand Teams with BroadSpire on Web Hosting Solutions, Fueling Business Growth for Popular PDA Community Site [7th October 2003]

As Monthly Site Traffic Registers Tenfold Increase, Expanded Hosting Infrastructure Helps Brighthand Secure Strategic Partners

LOS ANGELES (October 7, 2003) – BroadSpire (www.broadspire.com), a leading managed IT services provider, announced today that it has expanded its ongoing relationship with Brighthand (www.brighthand.com), the web’s leading site for information on handheld computers and smart phones.

BroadSpire is providing Brighthand with a high-availability hosting architecture, which has yielded both a dramatic increase in site traffic and helped to foster business growth for the popular portal. Brighthand upgraded its infrastructure to handle the increased volume of site traffic and to be able to support future expansion. BroadSpire’s solutions have contributed to the formation of new strategic partnerships between Brighthand and top-tier players like Palm, Microsoft, Sprint PCS and CNET.

Since switching to BroadSpire, Brighthand site traffic has grown from one million page views a month to more than 10 million page views. In addition, Brighthand has “on-tap” the ability to utilize BroadSpire’s shared load balancing service, which enables the company to add additional dedicated servers to the pool to support an exponential increase in traffic.

Named by PC World as one of the “101 Great Sites for Expert Advice,” Brighthand estimates that BroadSpire’s solutions have helped the company land contracts that will generate more than $500,000 in new revenue over the next three years.

"Working with BroadSpire has been a big win for our customers -- we've got the best team in the industry providing us with the support and services we need to continue expanding," said Steve Bush, founder and publisher, Brighthand. "Our customers can be confident in getting long-term service and support across the most complete product line in the hosting market.

“BroadSpire’s services have helped us create, innovate, and change the direction of our online community,” Bush said. “BroadSpire’s approach is based on the understanding that clients are regarded as partners, and the service level agreement has come to represent the beginning of a long-term relationship, not a one-off sale.”

“While we’ve deployed appropriate technology to facilitate Brighthand’s online growth, we have emphasized service above all,” said Suresh Srinivasan, president, BroadSpire. “We have focused our efforts on ensuring that Brighthand receives maximum value, generates true ROI from its Web infrastructure investment and can count on an infrastructure in a way that serves the business best – now and well into the future.”

Brighthand has taken advantage of the BroadSpire Express suite of services, which effectively “right-size” enterprise-class capabilities for small and mid-size businesses. Because much of Brighthand’s infrastructure is comprised of shared services -- where many customers rely on the same dedicated resource – the company has been able to reduce both capital investment and management expenses. This translates into overall annual cost savings for Brighthand and a more efficient deployment of resources as the company grows.

About BroadSpire
Founded in 1996, BroadSpire (www.broadspire.com) is a leading managed IT services provider, headquartered in Los Angeles, Calif. In delivering outsourced IT, data center outsourcing and fully managed Web hosting services, BroadSpire maintains a strict focus on customer service that has enabled the company to become a best-of-breed provider both in its service offerings and in its customer care. With discrete lines of business for enterprise and small/mid-size businesses, the company serves as a seamless extension of its customers' information technology infrastructure. BroadSpire has earned the trust of more than 2,000 companies worldwide, including BP Amoco, NBC, Yale University, Paramount Pictures, and Sheraton Hotels & Resorts.

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Contact:

Ken Greenberg
Edge Communications, Inc.
818-719-9292
ken@edgepress.com