Yes, the CEO nodded with weary resignation, his first and last names do raise an eyebrow now and then.

When your calling card summons a hybrid vision of two of the planet’s most notorious characters, it’s bound to
happen.

“But in 1967, when I was born, it wasn’t the case. So there wasn’t much my parents could do about it,” shrugged the chief exec of Toronto-based Q9 Networks Inc.

Larry MacDougal, Business Edge
Osama Arafat was in Calgary to launch the company’s $15-million Internet data storage centre.

“In Canada, we’re blessed with a country that looks at the person, not the name,” he said.

Several Canadian venture capitalists proved it by rolling out the red carpet when Osama Arafat – yep, that’s the gentleman’s name – came to call.

During Q9 Networks’ most recent round of financing, with Arafat leading the charge, the Internet service provider raised $115 million at a time when most VCs were keeping a tight grip on their long green.

Last week, Arafat was in Calgary to launch the
company’s $15-million data storage centre in Bankers Hall. And he put the lie to some prevailing myths.

Himself a former venture capitalist (whose contacts and credibility greased the skids for Q9’s fund-raising success), he knows from experience that VCs still have money to invest.

They will still place it with a skilfully managed ISP, although they no longer buy into every madcap dot-com scheme that crosses their desks.

“The capital is still there,” Arafat said. “The difference is that, post-2000 (the year of the dot-com decimation; also the year Q9 Networks was incorporated) they have become much more careful. But, in a sense, that has helped us.”

Natural selection weeded out the outfits with little to offer but pipe dreams and lame business plans. At the same time, corporate managers with demonstrable strengths tended to stick out like Rhodes scholars at a tractor pull.

“Once the venture capital companies saw all the elements of a good business plan, we found lots of people eager to give us money,” he said.

“We didn’t invent the next gadget. We have something with solid economics behind it.”

As Arafat told one inquisitive scribe who wondered whether the Internet was dead: “No. Bad business plans on the Internet are dead.”

In slightly more than two years, Q9 Networks has remained debt-free and built a viable customer base, hosting 160 corporate clients, including four of the five chartered banks, within its Toronto data centre. Q9’s westward expansion plan includes an all-out marketing blitz in Alberta.

Exactly a year ago, Canadian Business magazine singled out Q9 Networks as a low-profile ISP with a leg up on the market, saying the company was an exemplary example of the “new breed of Internet-service providers.”

That endorsement holds, for a number of reasons.
Arafat boasts that the Toronto data centre has never experienced a nano-second of down time and he confidently pledges the same guarantee to Calgary clients.

The ultra-secure Calgary centre takes the concept of ‘failsafe’ to new levels. It’s linked, via Enmax, to two entirely independent power systems. Two transformers are directly connected to Enmax. And two diesel generators and 50,000 litres of diesel fuel remain on hand for additional backup.

At the same time, Q9 Networks draws on the
services of every major service provider in North America, including TELUS, Shaw, Bell, Rogers, Sprint and AT&T.

“So no single failure of a provider can interrupt our service. This gives our customers the shortest, fastest path to their own clients,” Arafat explained.

Any way you slice it, it’s been a lively two years for the man whose previous start-ups include InfoRamp Inc., which he built into Toronto’s largest corporate ISP before off-loading the company to a now-bankrupt competitor.

“The (competitive) landscape has changed quite a bit since we started. At that time in Canada, there was a void of companies specializing solely in Internet infrastructure services,” recalled the one-time software developer.

“But, by the time we put Q9 Networks together, everyone and their grandmother wanted to be in this business.”
Competitors emerged (WorldCom, Teleglobe, Exodus Communications) and, one by one, fell away.

Today, Q9’s main competition comes from corporations such as TELUS, where data storage and
infrastructure services are only some of many products on offer.

“Our customers (i.e. Noranda, Goldcorp Inc., Fairmont Hotels & Resorts) clearly understand a focused company is preferable to a telecommunications company which tries to be all things to all people,” said Osama Arafat.

They also understand that a name is nothing more than a string of letters on a business card.