Interland Will Continue Trellix Services

Interland will continue to sell and support its Trellix line of private-label site building tools, and says the software remains an important part of its strategy despite recent staff cuts.

Interland bought Trellix last year for more than $12 million. On March 11 Interland closed the former Trellix headquarters in Concord, Mass. and laid off most staff at that office, prompting reports that the entire Trellix unit was shutting down. That's not the case, according to Fabrice Klein, Interland's vice president of strategy and investor relations. "It's a live platform with revenues, so we obviously want to support that," said Klein. "Customers are not going to see any change in service." Numerous ISPs, portals and domain registrars use Trellix Web Express as their private-label site building tool.

Largest Trellix Users, March 2004 Company Hostnames using Trellix  Primary Business  Lycos 14,938 Portal Earthlink 5,801 ISP Interland 5,647 Mixed Hosting InfoSpace Inc. 3,377 Portal Hurricane Electric 2,948 Mixed Hosting Abacus America, Inc. 2,299 Mixed Hosting

Trellix software lets users construct web pages without knowing HTML, making it popular among providers seeking to sell web sites to small business customers. Some private-label customers host Trellix-powered sites on their own server infrastructure, while others outsource the hosting to Interland, according to Klein.

Lycos uses Trellix Web Express on its Tripod hosting service, while other companies using service include Dotster, Tucows, iVillage, PeoplePC and McGraw-Hill.

Trellix founder and Interland CTO Dan Bricklin resigned his position in February, but called Interland's decision weeks later to shut the Concord office "a sad surprise." Klein said the cuts represented a streamlining of the Trellix operation, which had grown to include more than 100 staffers company-wide, and noted that several members of the original development team will continue with Interland. "When we bought Trellix, what we wanted was the software and expertise of key people who knew the product," said Klein, who added support for Trellix is provided through Interland's Atlanta staff.

Large Trellix customers seem unfazed by the recent confusion. "Interland says they will continue to support the product, so we will continue to use it," said Earthlink spokesman Dave Blumenthal.