FOCUS COLOCATION
Issue 17, August/September
FUTURE OF COLOCATION
Drew Leonard, Savvis VP of Colocation and Product Management on how Savvis plans to stay ahead in the market
W
hat is the state of the colocation market around the world, today?
In the US, the colocation
market is very strong, driven by the New York/ New Jersey, Chicago and northern California metropolitan markets. This year we expanded in Seattle and Atlanta to open new space to support demand.
We are similarly supporting other markets in the UK where we are looking to further spearhead the fi nancial services sector. In Asia, Singapore is in its prime, with strong demand emerging in new markets, especially in Hong Kong and mainland China.
There is an increased confi dence and reliance on colocation fi rst, then additional managed services to allow control of costs as businesses grow. The driver for colocation consumption is its cost effectiveness.
What shifts in the market do you foresee?
We are are managing the shift from colocation and managed services to cloud-based systems. The shift to fully virtualized environments, including all elements such as servers, storage and networking, is driving adoption of the full range of our capabilities from colocation to cloud. Hosted applications are also a driver. We expect continued growth from our clients who offer SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) and have a dedicated team to support this sector.
We also anticipate the greying of the area between wholesale and retail colocation provisioning.
Wholesalers are reducing
their client target size, which could start to encroach upon our client sweet spot, which in turn changes the pricing dynamic. We are monitoring this carefully but the wholesalers have a very bare-bones offer. So our approach will be to continue to educate and demonstrate to clients where we add value.
What are Savvis’ plans for expansion?
We are constantly upgrading and expanding our data center facilities. We have just upgraded our low-latency connectivity capabilities in London. We are actively looking at options for
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growing our European footprint. We also have global expansion plans for colocation, managed services and cloud, which we pro-rate to suit local market needs.
How important is time to market for colocation providers?
It is essential that we provide both colocation capacity and managed services on demand for our clients. Launching in new markets at the right time is critical. We must work closely with our sales teams so that the space is online as soon as clients are ready. Likewise, we strive to ensure that we minimize the amount of unbooked space.
Drew Leonard, Savvis
We constantly assess demand across markets. Our company watches new builds carefully, to see where wholesale and retail capacity becomes available, monitoring a range of demand indicators, our own utilization trends, seasonal trends and our current sales. We assemble that data into a multi-year plan for each strategic market. When we achieve thresholds outlined in the plans, we advance through the stages of our business process with the goal of just-in- time delivery for capacity into each market.
What are some of the largest changes in the technical space Savvis has had to accommodate in recent years?
We are focused on being able to provide a full range of enterprise-grade services which can be deployed and managed to support our clients’ mission-critical applications. The challenge has been to ensure these can be seamlessly integrated into any form of hybrid system the client desires, while remaining effi cient and manageable on a global scale.
Has the relationship you have had with the applications customers use changed?
Our core systems are designed to be application agnostic. We have, however, designed our managed services, particularly our enterprise- grade cloud, to offer comprehensive control and SLAs. This ensures each application can guarantee the resources and support necessary for performance availability that is tailored to its criticality. We provide and support an API and other automation tools so clients can
automate the deployment of application-aware infrastructure. We expect the provisioning of certain classes of applications, as part of a managed service offering, to become a draw for new business.
How does it handle the delicate balance between being green and satisfying customer requirements for reliability?
It is important to not over-provision for resilience in situations where good design principles have already delivered the required degrees of safety and performance.
What does it see as the biggest challenge with the green data center moving forward?
Ensuring that systems and processes are in place to deliver the environmental compliance and monitoring data required within and across all of the geographies where we operate.
How does Savvis ensure it stands out from the rest of the market?
Clients are increasingly savvy. They have signifi cant access to information and are increasingly using brokers. Our challenge is to ensure that we do not merely deliver a commodity and that we constantly differentiate ourselves through driving value for the client.
Our goal is to ensure that we consistently have enough space and power for our clients to expand.
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