1992

Mathew Wolf hires Eric Sachs in his senior year at Rice University to develop ideas for a new communications business based in Houston, TX.  Mathew was the son of Ernest Wolf, the founder of Wolf Explorations, an old & gas explorations business.  The new business was initially called Wolf Communications.

1993

 The first service provided by Wolf Communications was an X.400 E-mail hub based on technology from Isocor.  It allows small companies to send mail to Wolf vs. dialup modems, and then Wolf transferred it to more expensive X.25 lines which were connected to the X.400 mail servers deployed by some large businesses.  Initially the smaller companies were required to use the Lotus cc:Mail software.  However within a few months of launching this service, it attracted the interest of other large telecommunications companies who began offering similar services.

That summer Mathew & Eric were joined by Eric's classmates  Ann Zitterkopf, Mike Kiefer, & Eric Carmichael.  In July they developed an E-mail hub service based on the recently released Lotus Notes 3.0 software.  That required developing a security configuration that supported E-mail from multiple companies flowing through a central set of servers, even though that was not  part of the standard Lotus Notes system.

The service was named WorldCom (not to be confused with the later failed telecom firm).  The initial customers were allowed to use the service for free through the end of the year.  By late that summer, WorldCom also supported access via the Site X.25 network.

At the end of the year, WorldCom announced the end of the beta program and nearly every customer transitioned to becoming a payer customer.  The initial price of the service was $28.50/hour for access via a 9600 baud modem (and higher fees for access outside the U.S.).

1994

Soon other companies such as CompuServe also begain offering Lotus Notes services, though WorldCom was the market leader.  Then AT&T and Lotus announced plans to jointly build a service called Network Notes.  It received broad press coverage including a multiple age article in Newsweek and AT&T claimed it would produce $2 billion in revenue a year by 1997.

The WorldCom team accelerated their efforts to grow their customer base in prepartion for the launch of this service.  They started providing access to numerous news services through the WorldCom Notes Network including the first AP news feeds available on a hosted service.  They also added support for exchanging SMTP mail with the Internet, even though very few customers were initially interested in such a service.

1995

By this time, most companies using Lotus Notes had connected to one of the 3 major networks; WorldCom, CompuServe, or AT&T.  However the Internet had started growing in popularity, and the telcos (including AT&T and CompuServe) were threatened by it.  WorldCom pressed its advantage of being telco-neutral by advancing its SMTP mail support, as well as allowing users to request web pages asyncronously via Lotus Notes, as well as converting Lotus Notes databases into web pages.  WorldCom also offered accessing to a growing number of news services electronically.

During this year IBM also announced the acquisition of Lotus. 

The growing demand from the 1500+ companies using WorldCom's service enabled them to move into a much larger data center which was designed by Steven Wilgus who was only 18 at the time. 

1996

In March of 1996, AT&T shut down their Network Notes project and transferred most of their customers, including Compaq, to WorldCom.  At that time, 20% of companies using Lotus Notes were connected to the WorldCom service.  White AT&T's efforts had failed, other telcos around the world saw the opportunity in this new "software as a service" market.  By the end of the year, similar offerings were available from NTT, Telstra, BT, Deutsche Telekom, France Telecom, Telecom Italia, CompuServe, InfoNet, IBM Global Network, & US West.  Lotus launched a new program called Lotus Notes Public Services to handle their growing number of partners in this space.

Lotus also announced the new version of their server software, rebranded as Lotus Domino to highlights its focus on Internet & web technologies.  However WorldCom continued to stay on the cutting edge of technology and announced its support for wireless access to hosted Lotus Notes E-mail over the RAM Mobitext network.  WorldCom was the first company to offer wireless access to hosted E-mailed.

Later in the year, IBM, which had purchased Lotus in 1995, primarily because of Notes, evaluated the Notes network service business, and realized that it may make sense to simply buy WorldCom.  WorldCom rejected IBM’s offer, and in fact, signed on as its President Jim Lidestri, who had been group manager for the IBM Collaborative Services business unit, where he was responsible for developing IBM’s market and product strategy in network-based applications, focusing on Lotus Notes services

1997

In January of 1997, WorldCom announced that it would change its name to Interliant.  Another company known as LDDS WorldCom had grown quickly in the telecommunications, and many years later went bankrupts after a huge set of scandals.  LDDS WorldCom paid Interliant for the use of the name, and that funding enabled Interliant to continue to expand their infrastructure build outs to meet continued growth in demand. 

Interliant also announced their plans to start hosting Domino web based applications built by partners.  Lotus had similar interests, and entered into a co-development relationship with Interliant to build a platform called Domino Instant! Host which would be licensed to other Notes Public Networks while sharing the revenue between Lotus & Interliant.  The platform  included system services for application registration, user registration, usage tracking and reporting, and data synchronization.

1998

During 1998 Interliant focused on developing a suit of rentable applications branded AppsOnline built on the Instant! Host platform.  One of the key applications was Lotus' Instant Teamroom which provided a shared workspace for collaboration.  However by this time, the Internet and the web had grown greatly in popularity, and Interliant was under pressure to increase its financial capitalization so that it could also grow more quickly.  The term ASP (application service provider) became more common as other large players such as USi (US Internetworking) entered the space.  The Interliant executive team therefore began the search for partners, investors, or potential acquirers. 

1999

In March of 1999, Interliant accepted an offer to be acquired by Sage Networks led by Brad Feld (short video of executive meeting after the acquisition).  Sage was a well financed rollup of small web hosting companies, but each of those companies was small and young.  The Interliant team provide a larger base of employees/customers as well as a more experienced management team.

The combined companies then filed for an IPO in July.  The IPO raised $70M using the stock symbol INIT.  The Sage team continued a string of acquisitions and soon the Interliant executive team and most of their development resources were focused on helping with the work needed to merge those acquisitions.

That summer Interliant also launched the first customer, Fleetwood, for a service codenamed "Clairvoyant" which provided remote management of Lotus Notes servers.  By the end of the the year this had become Interliant's fastest growing business by revenue.

2000

In January Dell chose Interliant to be the provider for the DellHost shared & dedicated web hosting business and made a a $17.5M investment in Interliant anoung with BMC Software.  Interliant also announced the general availability of their Remote Management business.

By mid 2000, it became clear to the original Houston Interliant team that the board was under great pressure from stock analysts to diversify their platform of hosted applications.  However the experience of the Houston team made them confident that such a strategy would not succed.  Interliant raised $125M of debt via a convertible note offering which the board planned to use for further acquisitions.  However the President of the original Interliant, Jim Lidestri, then left the company.

One last cash infusion was provided when Microsoft invested $10M in Interliant for help building an infrastructure to enable application hosting for Windows 2000 Server systems and Exchange Server 2000 when it is released.  The project was similar to the earlier joint development of Interliant with Lotus for Domino Instant! Host.

However within a few months, many of the other key personnel from the original Houston Interliant team including Eric Sachs, Mike Kiefer, Steve Wilgus & Jesse Bornfreund.  Soon after that, the dot.com crash was in full force as many other firms were unable to meet the targets that had been projected for them by stock analysts.

2001 

In the next few years, the combined Interliant/Sage company sold off most of its acquisitions and restructured itself through a bankruptcy.  In the end, the original Interliant business as well as a security management business were still operating.  The original Interliant business was then sold to NaviSite who provided a broader range of application hosting services.  While the "death" of Lotus Notes continued to be touted, the user base for the product grew to 40M and continued to provide demand for Interliant's core E-mail hosting/management business.  The latest information on those services is available at Navisite's Manated Messaging site.