Savvis CEO Koen Resigns

Savvis Inc. chief executive officer Phil Koen resigned at the close of business Friday, the company said this morning. James Ousley will serve as interim chief executive officer while the company’s board of directors searches for a new CEO. Ousley has served as non-executive chairman of Savvis since May 2006 and as a director since April 2002.

In a morning conference call, Ousley said Koen’s departure was a “joint decision” by Koen and the board of directors. ”We’ve been talking for some time,” said Ousley. “We came to a mutual agreement that it was time for Phil to look for other opportunities. … The first of the year is always a good time to make these transitions.” 

Savvis (SVVS) also affirmed its 2009 guidance, apparently in a sign to investors that Koen’s sudden departure is not linked to any material change in the company’s performance. The current guidance calls for adjusted EBITDA of $215 to $220 million, and adjusted free cash flow of $40 to $50 million.

Ousley cited the company’s successes, and said the fourth quarter saw thew best bookings in 18 months. He also noted the progress under Koen in shifting the company’s colocation base toward enterprise customers, the growth of its proximity hosting business for financial traders,  and the company’s entrance into the cloud computing market.

But he also said Savvis hopes to launch a ”more aggressive pursuit of expanding our growth,” and said the company would take a “fresh look” at its sales and marketing efforts.

Roundup: Savvis, Axxana, Enomaly, ColoHouse

Here’s a roundup of some of some of this week’s headlines from the data center and hosting industry:

• Private clouds from Cisco and Savvis.  Savvis (SVVS) and Cisco (CSCO) announced an expanded relationship Monday that will focus on the development of private clouds for the enterprise. Formerly dubbed Project Spirit, the Savvis Symphony private cloud platform will integrate the Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS). This new platform will power the industry’s first enterprise-class Virtual Private Data Center (VPDC) with multi-tiered security and quality of service capabilities.  Savvis learned the benefits of the Cisco UCS solution early as they worked with Cisco to develop a reference architecture that will enable enterprise customers to take advantage of Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) benefits available in Savvis Symphony.
• Axxana Enterprise Data Recorder to be available through EMC Select. Data protection startup Axxana announced that its Phoenix System RP Enterprise Data Recorder will be available in January 2010 through EMC Select. The Phoenix System RP is a black box solution that was developed in cooperation with EMC’s RecoverPoint and delivers asynchronous data protection over any distance. ”Axxana’s Phoenix System will allow customers using RecoverPoint and CLARiiON networked storage to utilize replication over any distance, while maintaining the ability to recover data without data loss,” said Matt Mainstruck, manager of EMC SelectLast month Axxana secured $9 million in series B funding, led by Israel based Carmel Ventures.
• Enomaly launches cloud service provider edition. Cloud computing provider Enomaly announced the launch of 10 new global cloud computing service providers who have standardized and are powered by Enomaly’s Elastic Computing Platform (ECP), Service Provider Edition.  Called a “cloud in a box” solution for service providers, the ECP service provider edition is designed for carriers and hosting providers looking to build a line of business offering Infrastructure-on-Demand or Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) to customers.  The platform delivers a self-service dashboard and web-based API to manage virtual servers in whatever quantity needed.  Platform features include a multi-tenant, carrier class cloud platform with support for KVM, Xen and VMware hypervisors, detailed resource metering and accounting, tiered classes of service, a hard quota system and easy integration with back-office provisioning and billing systems.
• ColoHouse completes SAS70 audit. Miami data center and colocation provider announced completion of a SAS70 audit.  The audit focused on control environment, risk assessment, monitoring, control activities and information and communication systems. ”Obtaining our SAS 70 certification allows ColoHouse customers to rest easy knowing that we are following through on our commitment to provide the very best in Miami Data Center and Miami Colocation services, with a 3rd party validation to ensure our customers ultra secure access with a 100% uptime guarantee,” said Chief Operating Officer Alan P. Sabourin.

European Data Center Revenue May Double

Several stories from recent weeks highlight the vibrant data center industry in Europe. Here’s a roundup:

European data centre revenue set to double
A report published by Tariff Consultancy Ltd notes that European data centre revenue is “set to more than double over the five year period from 2010 to 2015, with net raised floor space to increase by 70%, driven primarily by price increases.” The report gives pricing and forecasts for 19 of the EU25 countries and analyzes pricing of a standard 19″ rack, a small cage space and a 50 KVA suite of space for each of the countries.  It also dives into trends impacting data centres such as raised floor capacity in markets, revenue per square meter forecasts, electricity pricing, pricing per rack and cage, and the most expensive data centre countries.

Savvis received EuroFIT award
Financial technology publication Waters published their innagural EuroFIT awards earlier in the month, to recognize Europe’s hottest financial IT products and services.  In the category of Best Datacenter Hosting Provider, Savvis (SVVS) took the award as a company capitalizing on the rising demand for data center services.  Equinix was listed as an honorable mention in the category. A little over a year ago Savvis marked the completion of a global data center expansion by opening a 37,500 square foot facility on the outskirts of London in Slough. The award also noted that Savvis services seven of the top ten Fortune 500 financial services and banking firms. Amazon (AMZN) won the Best Cloud Provider award as an “overwhelming leader in the field.”

The Bunker selected by Cimar
The Bunker announced that it was selected by Cimar (UK) Limited to provide managed ultra secure hosting of its radiology image sharing web service. The Bunker delivered a scalable platform to Cimar built on Microsoft technology.  Howard Jenkinson, managing director of Cimar said “absolute information security is a pre-requisite for any digital service carrying sensitive patient information.”  Click here for a video of ‘The Bunker’ and details of a July 2009 130,000 square foot expansion.

Roundup: Savvis, Raritan, NaviSite, Active Power

Here’s a roundup of news announcements from the data center and hosting industry:

• Savvis Selected by BATS Global Markets.  Savvis announced Monday that BATS Global Markets is expanding its hosting space in Savvis’ Weehawken data center to support business growth and its second U.S. equities exchange (BYX).  Expansion in the Savvis Docklands data center in London will also take place to support the BATS Europe multilateral trading facility.  BATS is a global financial markets technology company in Kansas City, Missouri and has been a Savvis customer since they were founded in 2005.  Savvis announced major expansion to the NJ2 data center in Weekhawken, New Jersey in July 2009, citing strong customer demand for proximity hosting and low latency connectivity to major financial exchanges.
• Raritan Introduces Intelligent Inline-meter Rack PDUs. Raritan introduced the new Dominion PX-3000 series Monday to its portfolio of intelligent rack power distribution and energy management products.  The new series of power meters are designed to be used in conjunction with dumb rack PDUs (Power Distribution Units) to provide strip-level metering and environmental monitoring.  The Dominion PX-3000 gathers a variety of power and environmental statistics and this real-time information can been seen with a local display or from a remote graphical user interface via a web browser.

Savvis Expands With Thomson Reuters

Thomson Reuters has been an important customer for managed hosting provider Savvis Inc., which had a lengthy and lucrative hosting deal with Reuters. That contract was something of a question mark when Reuters was acquired by Thomson. But this week the companies announced a major global expansion in which Savvis will provide data center space for a low latency trading platform for Thomson Reuters.

The global network will operate from Savvis data centers in New York, Chicago, London, Frankfurt, Tokyo, and Singapore and offer customers access to low latency market data, analytics and data management platform. “This launch is part of a significant investment to support customers as they respond to the rapidly evolving market environment,” said Jon Robson, the President, Enterprise for Thomson Reuters. “This is a natural step that will enable our clients to gain ubiquitous connectivity and access to industry leading, high performance, managed solutions for evolving sell-side and buy-side business needs.”

Here’s the interesting wrinkle: Savvis doesn’t currently have a data center in Frankfurt, a key European financial hub. Savvis says it is currently “evaluating options” for operations in Frankfurt. The company works closely with Digital Realty Trust, from whom it leases 1.7 million square feet of space in 17 sites. But Digital Realty doesn’t currently own properties in Frankfurt.

Vertafore to Host With Savvis

Vertafore, which provides IT services for the insurance industry, is moving its primary data center to a Fort Worth, Texas data center operated by managed hosting specialist Savvis Inc. (SVVS), the company said this week. Vertafore will continue to manage its SaaS-based products internally, while Savvis will operate Vertafore’s IT infrastructure.

“The new data center will give our customers faster results and greater peace of mind,” said Darryl Lemecha, Vertafore’s CIO. “Savvis’ facility allows us to better accommodate the rapid growth of our SaaS offerings, and our customers will benefit both from Savvis’ dedication to data center infrastructure and from continued product innovation from Vertafore. This move will allow us to focus on what we do best: creating, delivering and supporting our suite of industry-leading products.”

Savvis Previews Next-Gen Cloud Offering

Cloud computing for the enterprise is becoming more stratified. Savvis Inc. sees the breadth of approaches to the cloud as an opportunity, and is crafting its new  infrastructure as a service (IaaS) offering with three tiers of pricing and features - all powered by the latest technology from Cisco and VMware.

The new platform, known as “Project Spirit,” is being announced today at VMworld 2009 in San Francisco. Savvis will launch a beta in the fourth quarter of this year, with general availability in 2010. The service is being billed as a”virtual private data center” that is a leap forward from Savvis’ initial foray into the cloud in February.

Powered by Cisco and FCoE
The new platform will be powered by Cisco’s Nexxus 5000 and 7000 switches and use a unified network fabric running over Fiber Channel over Ethernet (FCoE). Savvis, which was an early adopter of Cisco’s Nexxus line, will also use VMware’s vSphere hypervisor and Cisco Nexxus 1000 virtual switches.   

Although high-end hardware and software will power Project Spirit, Savvis is offering three levels of plans, ranging from a top tier for the most stringent enterprise requirements to a bottom tier with pricing and features optimized for testing and development projects - the types of services currently being run on Amazon Web Services. The company is describing the service levels as being defined by quality-of-service (QoS).

Roundup: Energy-Aware Routing, Savvis, XO, Juniper

Here’s a roundup of some of some of this week’s headlines from the data center and hosting industry:

• Energy-Aware Internet Routing. An energy reduction of as much as 40% could be seen by rerouting data to locations where electricity prices are lowest on a particular day.  This was according to a study from MIT, Carnegie Mellon University, and Akamai.  MIT PhD student Asfandyar Qureshi first outlined the idea of a smart routing algorithm in October 2008 and he then approached researchers at Akamai to obtain the real-world routing data needed to test the idea.  ”The researchers first analyzed 39 months of electricity price data collected for 29 major US cities. The team then devised a routing scheme to take advantage of daily and hourly fluctuations in electricity costs across the country”.  Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory staff scientist Jonathan Koomey said “the trick is to be able to control these systems well enough to create controls that are cheap enough to be able to take advantage of the arbitrage opportunity available from different electricity prices, without effecting reliability or latency.”  The research paper, to be presented at SIGCOMM 2009 can be found here.
• Tradebeam selects Savvis to support IT infrastructure. Savvis announced Monday an agreement to provide hosting services to TradeBeam, a software-as-a-service provider for global trade management (GTM).  TradeBeam’s solutions facilitate billions of dollars of global trade.  TradeBeam Vice President of IT said “Savvis is an industry leader offering a global footprint of high performance SAS 70 certified data centers integrated with one of the world’s largest Tier 1 networks”.
• XO Communications embarks on third nationwide network capacity upgrade. The XO inter-city transport network will more than double in capacity with the latest upgrade, to be completed later this year.  XO Communications again chose Infinera products to deploy the ultra-long-haul network, this time using Infinera’s ILS2 line and delivering 160 wavelengths on a single fiber.  The 1.6 Terabits/second optical capacity will service carriers, service providers and enterprise customers as well as XO’s Carrier Services network transport offerings.  The current Infinera DTN system is the only DWDM system with 160 wavelengths in the C-band and is scalable to 8 Tb/s in the future.

Major Expansion for Savvis’ NJ Trading Hub

Savvis, Inc. (SVVS) announced plans for a significant expansion to its Savvis NJ2 data center in Weehawken, N.J., citing growing customer demand for proximity hosting and low latency connectivity to major financial exchanges. Savvis has leased space adjacent to Savvis NJ2 that will add approximately 105,000 square feet of raised floor for the deployment of high-performance hosting for the financial services industry. Savvis said the expanded facility “creates a powerful financial data center complex” in its most active market.

“The demand in the marketplace for financial IT infrastructure continues to grow as companies outsource to trusted providers,” said Phil Koen, Chief Executive Officer of Savvis. “Today’s news creates a strong financial data center complex with two of our state-of-the-art facilities making Savvis the destination of choice for financial services companies.”