An Austrian Company with a Worldwide Footprint: Anexia Delivers High-Quality Customized IT Solutions to Multinational Corporations

TL; DR: Anexia is an Austria-based IT provider offering high-quality managed hosting solutions as well as software and app development services. The global company serves more than 10K active customers on a worldwide network with more than 90 international server locations. With a focus on delivering customized solutions and hands-on support, Anexia aims to stand out among industry giants like AWS and Azure.

When Alexander Windbichler set out to start his IT consulting and hosting business in June 2006, the odds seemed stacked against him. The dot-com bubble had burst a few years earlier, and a financial crisis was quickly approaching.

But the young entrepreneur pushed forward with an unwavering commitment and precise market positioning. “He hired an extremely proficient engineer, and together they began lending their technical expertise to local Austrian businesses,” said Adam Rogers, Managing Director at Anexia. “They did a fantastic job building their customer base, and over time gained visibility and added to their infrastructure.”

The strategy worked, and Anexia soon found success serving renowned clients in Austria and across the globe via a high-quality international network that includes independent datacenters. Today, Anexia’s 200 employees operate out of offices in Vienna, Klagenfurt, Munich, Cologne, and New York City, offering customized solutions in cloud and managed hosting, as well as individualized software and app development. The company, which boasts more than 90 international server locations, now serves over 10,000 clients worldwide, including major players like Airbnb, BMW, Lufthansa, and TeamViewer.

Between its sprawling global network, customized solutions, and hands-on assistance, Anexia is poised to serve an influx of new customers in the future. And, with solutions for dynamic compute and storage in the pipeline, the company will soon have even more to offer.

Anexia’s early growth spurt was due in part to a partnership with a prominent German company in need of international hosting for its Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) platform. At the time, AWS was in its infancy and lacked a global presence, so the German company attempted to build its own network.

“A year later, they had 180 vendors — as well as currency disasters and extremely poor support,” Adam said. “They soon realized they needed to start consolidating their infrastructure to a few vendors.”

Anexia was one of them. “We did so well that they just started handing more and more sites to us,” Adam said. “Today, we run about 70% of global IP traffic for that customer, as well as the customer’s TeamViewer.”

The partnership helped Anexia quickly expand its global presence and chart a path forward. Today, the company’s primary goal is to create customized Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) solutions for multinational corporations. As Anexia’s interactive network map illustrates, the company now provides services throughout Asia, Africa, Australia, Europe, North America, and South America.

Adam said his role leading Anexia’s U.S. office revolves primarily around work with multinational businesses.

“We opened that office on February 1, 2015, and my focus became essentially looking for corporations in the U.S. that needed global infrastructure with a localized IP,” he said. “So, if they needed a site in Thailand, they needed IPs that were in Thailand and not being directed to Hong Kong and back. That’s how we built our business — with solutions uniquely suited to the customer.”

Anexia’s vast portfolio of hosting and IT solutions includes managed hosting solutions via powerful server capacities. No matter how complex the requirements are, the company is ready and willing to put together a plan that will satisfy the customer’s needs in terms of speed, scalability, availability, and storage.

Adam said Anexia is one of the only providers to offer managed hosting solutions around the globe. “Our years of experience designing IT solutions worldwide make us a strong partner in the international market,” he said.

The company’s managed hosting solutions feature load-balancing techniques, virtual and shared firewalls, and web application firewalls. The plans also feature reliable protection against Distributed-Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attacks. The attacks, in which hackers force servers to crash by sending an overwhelming number of requests, have been increasing in frequency and intensity in Austria and worldwide.

In 2018, Anexia successfully blocked a memcached amplification attack that was at the time considered the largest ever registered to an Austrian provider. “The target of the attack was a well-known international service provider and long-time client of our comprehensive services,” Anexia Founder and CEO Alexander Windbichler said at the time. “The attack lasted 13 minutes and was successfully blocked thanks to our Cyber Defense Specialists and our Backbone Europe infrastructure.”

In addition to customizable and secure managed hosting services, Anexia is known for individualized software and mobile app development. Designed to help customers stand apart from the competition, the company’s development solutions result in custom-made software and applications designed for any platform. To ensure a smooth development process, this service includes guidance from the company’s project management team, which works alongside mobile app developers to guide customers through conception, implementation, and maintenance.

Lena Marder, Marketing GVG at Rewe Group, gave Anexia’s development services a glowing review. “We originally commissioned Anexia to program our basic beverage delivery service app for iPhone and Android,” she said. “The design, graphics, and technical implementation worked out wonderfully, and we got a great product. Due to the fabulous collaboration, we were happy to put the development of our other apps into the hands of the experts at Anexia.”

Industry behemoths like AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud may have a stronghold on the hosting market at large, but Adam said there are some things those cloud providers simply can’t offer.

“When customers choose Anexia, it’s because we have something unique that big players can’t readily provide — such as direct assistance in building out cloud infrastructure,” he said. “Many companies don’t have the in-house expertise to build sophisticated infrastructure on someone else’s cloud without support, and that’s why our support team offers that service.”

In addition to customer need, Adam said Anexia’s ongoing development process is closely tied to market demand. “We’re building out each and every one of our locations to accommodate more customers in a way that meets the market needs, including being able to hyperscale on a digital platform.”

In other words, Anexia plans to enable customers to buy services online without having to work directly with the company through a manual process. The capabilities, when launched, will be referred to as dynamic compute and storage. Adam said these features are being developed as a direct response to customer demand in a digital world.

“Four years ago, we didn’t have an automated capability; people would talk to us on the phone, tell us what they want, and we could plan a service order,” he said. “That world is going away apart from truly customized solutions.”

On the new product front, Adam said Anexia recently began offering archival storage capabilities that include meta tagging and erasure coding.

“This is a truly exciting product, especially for the media industry, which needs to archive a lot of content in a singular location,” he said. “They can just upload it into the system, and it will automatically create copies of content in different places around the world. The security capability is great because any one of those sites can go down without losing data.”

As the market becomes increasingly competitive, Adam said solutions like these will help Anexia stand out in a sea of hosting providers.

“We have to be able to offer services that are similar enough to mass hyperscalers, yet create unique solutions for our customers,” he said. “The way I look at it, there’s always going to be a need for something that’s customized in the marketplace.”