Savvis takes top cloud ranking in Gartner study

April 15, 2013 | By Sean Buckley

Savvis, CenturyLink's (NYSE: CTL) cloud and data center subsidiary, was named as one of the top managed hosting providers in North America on Gartner's Magic Quadrant where it is directly competing with AT&T (NYSE: T) and Verizon (NYSE: VZ).

Delivering services through its growing base of U.S. and international data centers, Savvis currently offers a set of shared, dedicated, and hybrid cloud solutions to its multi-site business clients.

"Savvis can handle extremely complex deals, including large-scale e-commerce and enterprise application hosting needs," wrote Gartner in their report. "It has a very broad portfolio of supported infrastructure, middleware stacks and application environments."

Savvis has performed consistently well for CenturyLink. Operating inside of CenturyLink as the telco's Enterprise Markets – Data Hosting division, revenues rose 12.7 percent year-over-year to $292 million in Q4 2012.

While its main focus is on serving large multinational corporation customers (MNCs), it expanded its cloud and managed service portfolio to a broader audience via the launch of its savvis direct solution last December. It also expanded its application support capabilities via its acquisition of Ciber last October.

The service provider isn't without its issues, however.
"Gartner clients have noted a dilution of focus and support quality within the business following the spate of acquisitions during the past two years that have led to the company's current organizational structure," the report said. "Savvis has multiple hosting and cloud IaaS offerings among its suite of services, which can leave customers unsure which line of service is best for their needs."