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Savvis capitalizes on their cloud customer relationships

Savvis lays it on the line on providing reliable cloud services.
Written by David Chernicoff, Contributor

One of the issues that consumers of cloud services consider, as part of the selection process for determining which cloud service providers to use, is the reliability of the infrastructure that is hosting the desired services. Removing that concern from the purchase selection criteria can speed the adoption process for cloud services, and that's part of what Savvis is trying to do with its Client Connect service.

After all, if you are using a colo or cloud host for yourself, you must have already gone through the vetting process for that provider, otherwise why would you be using their services? And Client Connect is designed to give Savvis customers an enhanced ability to connect with other Savvis datacenter users in any of the Savvis datacenter facilities.

The Client Connect service, which Savvis customers need to voluntarily choose to participate in, both as buyers and sellers, is basically a directory of service providers hosting at any of Savvis' datacenter facilities. Each client gets a profile page where they can promote their service offering and where they need to provide contact information for potential customers. Offering your company's services in this fashion also includes the requirement for rapid deployment; Savvis is attempting to guarantee rapid client-to-client cross-connect provisioning, with a deployment completion target of within 48 hours when the service is ordered via the SavvisStation portal.

This is one of those perfectly obvious things that every large scale coclo and hosting services vendor should be providing. While a goal of using cloud services is to be able to not worry where the actual services reside, that's proven to be a somewhat elusive task. Weekly reports of even the largest service providers facing outages have to make customers think twice about where the service they contract for is being hosted. Especially given the degree of finger pointing that seems to occur when problems do crop up.

By promoting the other services running within the environment they control, Savvis would take the heat for any outages; giving their customers the proverbial "one throat to choke" for infrastructure issues. So making this service model available not only promotes customers of Savvis, but also shows them taking a stand for the reliability of their underlying infrastructure.

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