Overview:

At an invitation only event in Palo Alto, CA on March 31st, Savvis, Inc.  announced its Cloud computing Alliance Program for channel partners.  Savvis is a  global leader in cloud infrastructure and hosted IT solutions for enterprises (see About Savvis section below for more info on the company).  Through the flexible, multi-level program, Savvis alliance partners are able to offer Savvis cloud services, as well as managed hosting, colocation, network services and managed security services, to their clients. By registering as an alliance partner, participants receive access to Savvis’ assets and intellectual property through the partner portal at www.savvis.com/alliances.

“We are investing in the growth and successes of our partners globally,” said Jaywant Rao, vice president of global alliances for Savvis. “Our goal is to deliver an agile, streamlined and highly beneficial experience to our partners based on collaboration and the sharing of expertise.”  And it was quite impressive to hear testimonials from the numerous alliance partners that gave short speeches at Savvis’ March 31st coming out party.  Cisco and Oracle are amongst the infrastructure vendors that Savvis is using to delver cloud computing based services to their customers.  Thompson-Reuters, Cognizant, Forsythe Technologies and Gravitant are other partners that presented strong endorsement of Savvis’ IT infrastructure capabilities. Thompson-Reuters is working with the company to offer an Elektron Financial Cloud for ultra fast electronic trading/  Gravitant and Savvis have deployed a “Texas Cloud” available in that state.

The Savvis Alliances Program is customized to meet the unique, individual needs of system integrators, managed service providers, telecommunications companies, application providers, and technology vendors. Several companies have already joined the program at launch.

Savvis claims they “take cloud services to the next level with the converged cloud, our secure, high-performance cloud infrastructure. The combination of our global, low-latency distribution network, our managed virtualized hosting environment and our unique business model allows Savvis to design complete, end-to-end, quality of service-enabled solutions for our clients.”

Details of the Cloud Alliance Program: – Q&A
1. What Savvis offerings are targeted at partners?
Savvis offers enterprise-class IT solutions that are available through partners as part of the Savvis Alliances Program. These offerings broadly fall into the following categories:

• Managed hosting
• Colocation
• Cloud
• Network services
• Managed security services

2. How do the solutions benefit Savvis partners?
Savvis solutions help partners drive new offerings to the market by allowing them to bundle, integrate or white-label Savvis solutions. All of these offerings enable enterprise-class end-customer solutions to be deployed in a global infrastructure. These offerings are available to Partners with varying levels of margins and pricing options, helping Partners to drive net new top line revenue for themselves.

3. What is the profile of the target partner for this program?
Savvis carefully crafted the program to meet different needs for different partners. Not all partners are created equal, and it was really important to understand this in order to create a partner-oriented program rather than a Savvis-offering-focused program. The program is aimed at:

• Systems integrators
• Managed service providers
• Telco/carriers
• Application providers
• Technology providers

4. What partner engagement models are available?
Partners can work with Savvis under the following engagement models:

• Referral: Partners refer opportunities to Savvis in return for fees tied to the size of the deal.
• Reseller: Partners re-sell Savvis offerings on their contract to their end-customers and in turn get built-in margin pricing.

5. What are the three levels of the Savvis Alliances Program?
The Savvis Alliances Program features three levels:

• Strategic: Global partners that demonstrate a deep investment in sales and marketing enablement for driving Savvis offerings via their own distribution channels. For example, in the U.S. this typically applies to companies in the Fortune 1000 category.
• Preferred: Regional or vertical-specific partners that provide coverage for a given geography or application offering. Typically these partners focus on mid/small market.
• Affiliate: Partners that wish to engage with Savvis for a one-time transaction as a reseller.

6. How should partners engage with Savvis?
The best place to start is by visiting the Savvis Alliances Program website at www.savvis.com/Alliances. There, potential partners can learn more about the program, including levels and services, and register to become a partner.

7. What is the Savvis Alliances Partner Portal?
The partner portal (www.savvis.com/Alliances) is designed to support the partner community. For new partners evaluating a Savvis relationship, the portal presents an overview of the program, outlining the different membership levels with associated benefits and requirements, listing the resources available to members and providing an online application to engage with Savvis.
For existing partners, the password-protected section of the portal gives access to Savvis assets and intellectual property such as marketing and sales enablement tools, training courses and a collaboration forum for partners to network and exchange ideas.

8. What is your international strategy for partners?
International growth is a high priority for Savvis, and we have made several investments to drive growth in key global regions. We operate 31 data centers around the globe and, through partnerships, have direct access to many other data centers. Our reach extends to places such as the United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Japan, Hong Kong, Singapore, Brazil and Germany. We are working with strategic partners in key geographies to enter additional markets, including India (Bharti airtel) and others. A large share of our international revenue is targeted to come from partners with multi-tiered distribution models, and we have invested in dedicated teams to drive that program globally.

9. How does the joint selling program work?
Savvis keeps a database of its partners and their core competencies (i.e., expertise in a vertical market or regional presence). Partners with a client opportunity can connect with other partners on joint selling when a specific core competency is required.

Interview with Savvis CTO Bryan Doerr:

In a one on one chat, Bryan agreed with me that the network aspects of Cloud Computing had been severely neglected by the industry.  In the absence of any standards or guidelines, each cloud service/ network provider has to make specific agreeements with EACH cloud customer.  AT&T does this and so does Savvis.  Clearly this doesn’t scale to accomodate many smaller customers that want to migrate their apps and storage to the cloud. 

Savvis uses an IP MPLS network that can offer various grades of network sharing/ separation, QoS and other metrics.  But in absence of a standard UNI or NNI, many questions arise. 

In a follow up discussion with Bryan and his networking experts,  we plan to report on the network aspects of Saviss”converged cloud.”  These include: guaranteed performance, QoS (e.g. latency, jitter, thruput, error rates, etc), availability, reliability,  protection/ restoration/ disaster recovery on failure of either servers and/or the network, SLAs, monitoring for SLA compliance (3rd party?), authentication and authorization, provisioning/reprovisioning, policy control, network management (including back end/ OSS/BSS functions), and security.

About Savvis

Savvis, Inc. (NASDAQ:SVVS) is an outsourcing provider of managed computing and network infrastructure for IT applications. By outsourcing to Savvis, enterprises can focus on their core business while Savvis ensures the quality of their IT infrastructure. Leading IT organizations around the world have selected Savvis to help them improve their service levels, reduce capital expense and deal with the rising costs of bandwidth, energy, real estate, staff and expertise. As a pioneer in utility computing, Savvis understands and harnesses the latest advances in technology such as virtualization, cloud computing and support process automation.  Savvis focuses exclusively on providing IT services to business enterprises. Because of its global infrastructure, management systems and business model, Savvis has the unique capability to deliver fully managed and integrated IT solutions to enterprises with offices around the word.  Facts:             

• Nearly 2,500 unique business and government clients, including more than 30 of the top 100 companies in the Fortune 500
• More than 2,200 employees with deep expertise in technical operations, customer support, engineering and consulting
• $933 million in revenue in 2010.

Products & Services:                                                                                                                                                                                                                Savvis provides IT infrastructure services that can be used as part of a total outsourcing solution or to selectively support specific applications or business units.  Services include:
• Cloud – one of the industry’s broadest lines of enterprise-class cloud services
• Colocation, Managed Hosting and Utility Compute – facilities and operations; compute, storage and network
• Network – converged applications; community of interest networks; private lines; Internet
• Security – managed security services and consulting
• Industry Solutions – financial, government and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS)
• Professional Services – infrastructure, security, business continuity, compliance and program management

Infrastructure:
The Savvis infrastructure extends to 45 countries and includes:
• 31 data centers, encompassing approximately 1.5 million square feet of raised floor
• 22,000 managed circuits in a private network supporting multiple application service levels
• Tier-1 OC-192 Internet backbone with more than 17,000 miles of fiber

For more information about the Savvis Alliances Program, visit www.savvis.com/alliances. In addition to providing details about the program, the site includes a portal through which channel partners can access marketing, sales and technical materials.