Giovanni Losi of REGdom took a few minutes to tell us about his company for Meet The Resellers. REGdom is an important player in the Italian Internet industry. Here’s our chat:

How long has REGdom been doing business and tell us about all the services you offer to your customers?

We started our business in early 1996 as one of the first .it maintainers, registering .it domains at the newly born .it registry (NIC). At first, we were more focused on web hosting as a classic Internet service provider (ISP); however while growing, we acquired our own data center which allowed us to start a new area of activity offering hosting solutions to other companies. This allowed us to develop partnerships and create new product offerings.

In late 2001, we became more aware of the need to split our products in different brands, managing them as different companies in the attempt to be more flexible and quickly follow the changes of the market. Our products lineup now varies from hosting/housing to fax-to-mail services. As REGdom – the brand focused on domain registrations – we’re developing a completely new platform to allow our partners maintain their domains in an easier way.

Any interesting stories from your company’s history?

Our company took part at the first round-table discussing the rules for .it domain registrations when the Italian Registration Authority was founded. It’s interesting to see how this market has grown and how many key players are still here while others are gone. I think that paying attention to the past is a great way to learn and to lead a new path for the future.

We are proud of our contribution to the .it registrar agreement and also were involved in the technical procedure tests. Being a small actor in the progress of the Internet is one of the factors that makes this job so exciting.

Giovanni Losi, Product Manager
REGdom

How did you personally get into the Internet business?

Well, like a lot of people in this sector, it all started as a hobby. I have loved technology and computers since I was a child, so I think I was one of the first to be passionate about the Internet when it became a reality in Italy in the middle of the 90s. After working for a company selling computers and related services I jumped on the new economy ship and started working as a systems administrator for an ISP. I immediately fell in love with this new world and its opportunities. Year by year, I became more interested in how the Internet works and what lies behind everything. In 2008, after some months splitting myself in two different positions, I fully crossed the line to become a REGdom Product Manager.

Where are you located and what makes it such a great place to do business?

Our headquarters is in Brescia, a city in northern Italy pretty close to Milan. It gives almost the same advantages as working in the more famous city: affordable technology, low prices for bandwidth, without considering that all the biggest ISPs and the MIX (Milan Internet eXchange) are in this area. Apart from that Brescia is more liveable than Milan: less traffic, less air pollution, a smaller city centre. It’s less chaotic. We’re just 20 minutes driving time from the Garda Lake, a vacation spot where relaxing with many activities, from sunbathing to water sports.

How long have you been an OpenSRS Reseller and how has your partnership with OpenSRS helped your company succeed?

We signed the contract in 2003 but we started doing business seriously with OpenSRS a couple of years later. At the beginning we used to register domains with many other registrars because we would have loved to try different reseller services. When business started growing we realized we couldn’t afford to have as many web panels with the increase of TLDs. We needed a strong partner with a solid assistance to rely on, and our path led us to OpenSRS showing it as that kind of ideal partner. It gives us the opportunity to keep all our domains in a unique interface and the API support helped and is still helping us to grow and speed up our registration processes.

What can we do to make the relationship stronger?

It has been a good idea to create an European technical department, supplying us a better and faster support, more reliable with the same working hours.

Widening the tld’s choice range would be appreciated too, as our customers are mostly based in Europe and sometimes they want to register European ccTLDs. As we deep developed our systems to connect with your API we would like to fully take advantage of that and register even more domains (and TLDs) with OpenSRS.

Any other suggestions or feedback for us?

The squishy cows you sent us are wonderful! Everybody loves them in the office and I’m planning to bring one on holiday with me for some fancy photo shoot, please send us more gadgets when possible!

Having a direct OpenSRS contact who speaks our language is an additional thing that should not be under estimated. No other operator at an international level has offered this to us.