The Island prides itself on its Victorian heritage and cleaves to technologies of yesteryear with the electric and steam trains along with horse-drawn trams and the Laxey Wheel.

And at the same time it showcases some of the best telecommunications and IT infrastructures in the world.

Go figure!

The Island's seen an investment of more than £50 million in telecoms infrastructure over the past few years and a further investment of £30 million in the next three years will see capacity grow in line with the market.

In addition there are a number of excellent datacentre and hosting providers here.

Manx Telecom, Domicilium, Continent 8 and Netcetera have collectively invested more than £30 million to build state of the art data hosting facilities

Domicilium, located in Ballasalla, is doing some innovative stuff with SaaS, or cloud computing by offering a suite of products designed to aid offshore businesses.

Software as a Service (SaaS) means you get the functions and benefits of the software via the internet, without a big upfront investment, licensing costs and upgrades.

They offer something called IPP which enables corporate and trust administrators to provide their clients with an internet capability, and Filesafe, a web-based document storage service for a secure and central access to documents and data and multicurrency credit card payment processing.

Also located in Ballasalla is Netcetera.

They've been busy scooping accolades in recent years: the company has been listed for three years running in Deloitte's 50 Fastest Growing Technology Companies, it was rated the number one UK shared web hosting provider for January 2008 by Webhost Directory and earlier this year Netcraft, named Netcetera as the most reliable web host in Britain and sixth worldwide in the global league table.

Continent 8, linked with Canada's Mohawk Internet Technologies, opened a new data centre in the Isle of Man last year.

It's part of a world wide network of hosting centres that lets ebusinesses serve global markets and gives the peace of mind in terms of disaster recovery capacity.

Manx Telecom has also recently invested in a new data centre.

Its £7.5 million facility in North Douglas along with the web park facility in central Douglas offer both state of the art hosting services and a convenient location for Manx companies.

The new datacentre is designed with high security in mind; pass and pin entry points control access to every area and perimeter security fencing ensures no-one gets in or out without the necessary authority.

CCTV with infrared capability offers round the clock remote monitoring of the site. It's an offer that the Steam Packet company found attractive.

More than 60 per cent of the ferry service's customers now book via the website which currently averages around 3,200 visits daily and the Steam Packet plans to increase online bookings and to introduce a range of new services online so these figures looks set to grow.

Mark Woodward, the Steam Packet's chief executive explained: 'Manx Telecom was able to offer exemplary speeds, exceptional resilience, excellent technical engineering support, plus detailed performance monitoring.

'We were certain that they could provide us with the best possible and most comprehensive solution for our increasingly demanding needs.'

The Island's hosting facilities serve a broad range of markets and industries, but egaming is a major target sector.

Some of the world's biggest brands in online gambling have operations or are hosted in the Isle of Man and many more licence applications are in the pipeline.

Already the industry employs more than 400 people in the Isle of Man.
With today's uncertainty in the global finance sector, the government's diversification strategy seems to have been a wise one.


>>Sherrilynne Starkie is the managing partner of Strive Public Relations, a strategic communications consultancy serving the Isle of Man. Visit her business blog, Strive Notes for frequent updates www.strivepr.com/notes or follow her on twitter.com/sherrilynne.