XOR center mission control for Internet space

BOULDER – Greg Jacobsen, chief executive officer and president of XOR Inc., sits in his spacious Boulder office and talks about beer; specifically, a local brewer he knows. While some companies brew, store and deliver their beer, the brewer Jacobson knows merely owns the recipe.

This is a perfect example of what Jacobsen calls “virtual companies.” Instead of handling everything from production to distribution, virtual companies contract out most of the operations that make their businesses work. Jacobson says these types of companies are the “next generation of business.” They have been able to develop during the last 10 years because of the Internet.

XOR, a Boulder-based developer and manager of customized e-Business solutions, provides the tools that help virtual companies run more smoothly. The company designs and builds Web sites, hosts the server they run on and provides technical assistance anytime, day or night. As a result, clients don’t have to track down different companies when they have a problem with their Web site. XOR also helps companies keep track of their contractors and provides consulting services. “We basically are the infrastructure,” Jacobsen says.

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XOR is counting on its new, $5 million, 10,000-square-foot Electronic Commerce Management (ECM) Center to help them provide those infrastructures and allow clients to view the efficiency and progress of their virtual businesses.

“The facility gives us more focus,” Jacobsen says. “It’s a more professionally designed space.”

The ECM Center, which will be manned by e-business professionals 24 hours a day, feels like a calm, futuristic control center for NASA. It consolidates XOR’s existing e-commerce management facilities into one building. In the managed services center, rows of tables with the latest computers face a giant split screen that can display information from any station in the room. Behind the tables, separated by a glass wall, is a client meeting room.

The glass wall allows clients to view the giant screen and one of XOR’s newest offerings – “VisionPort,” a Web-based tool that allows clients to manage their business in real time. So if a company buys a Super Bowl ad, for instance, its executives can use VisionPort to see how many more hits their Web site had and how many sales they made as soon as the ad runs. Companies also can use the service to check on the progress of a company contracted to make or deliver their product. Data is updated constantly, so the nervous, insomniac executive can check in the middle of the night and still get current results.

While he hasn’t seen the center, Milan Pipersky, owner of Worldcast Communications and Emerald Stream Productions, which produce video for Web sites, likes the idea. “If it fosters an in-the-moment, dynamic, co-operative, problem-solving environment, I’d say all the best. That’s the kind of company I’d like to create here,” he says.

XOR started planning the center last June. It isn’t complete, yet, but Trent Hein, XOR’s chief technology officer and co-founder, says it should be up and running by the end of August.

The center is an improvement from XOR’s existing facilities, which aren’t as consolidated and are a lot more crowded. The room they’re using now to house the file storage for their networks and Internet servers is closet-sized compared to the 8,000-square-foot room the company has at the ECM Center.

Hein says the center will only be 20 percent full when XOR moves in, allowing for a great deal of expected growth. It’s also “pre-wired,” according to Jacobson, which will allow XOR to add customers easily.

And if the last year and half is any indication, it’s a good thing they have so much room to grow. When Jacobsen bought XOR, along with similar companies in Chicago, Tulsa, Okla., and San Francisco in May 1999, XOR had only 45 employees. The ECM Center alone will have 237 employees, and the company already has grown to 500.

XOR clients typically sign three-year, multimillion-dollar agreements for XOR’s Electronic Commerce Management services. Those deals now add up to about $70 million, according to Jacobsen, with clients such as Ourhouse.com, Vitamins.com, iBelieve.com and Cyber Crop paying about $300,000 to $400,000 a month for all services offered by Electronic Commerce Management.

With that kind of growth and an ECM Center capable of five times as much, don’t count on things to slow down any time soon. “In this world of e-business, you can never rest. The work is never done,” Jacobsen says.