Verizon, Savvis lead Europe's managed hosting market, says Gartner

June 26, 2013 | By Sean Buckley

Verizon (NYSE: VZ) and Savvis, CenturyLink's (NYSE: CTL) data center and cloud subsidiary, have taken leadership spots in the European market, according to Gartner's Magic Quadrant report on managed hosting providers.

Leveraging its global network and the assets it purchased from Terremark in 2011, a move that created its colocation and cloud business, the service provider immediately established itself as a global managed hosting player.

Magic Quadrant for European managed hosting providers, June 2013. (Source: Gartner)

Out of the 25 data centers it operates in North America, Europe, Asia and Latin America, Verizon Terremark offers colocation and managed hosting on dedicated servers and private or public cloud Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS).  

"Customer service for the historical Terremark base has improved significantly since Verizon acquired Terremark," wrote Gartner. "Verizon Terremark is able to use its network as a differentiator for use cases where network access is a heavily weighted criterion, or where end-to-end service management with SLAs is required."

Verizon Terremark is not without its weakness. The research firm said that the service provider should look at improving its SLAs and improving its sales prospects with domestic European-based companies.

"While Verizon Terremark is rewriting its SLA for high-availability managed hosting solutions, its current SLA for 99.5% availability places it below those of its market peers," wrote Gartner. "Verizon Terremark's sales focus is mainly on multinational enterprises with a European presence. Verizon Terremark does not market widely to domestic organizations in Europe."

Like Verizon, CenturyLink immediately enhanced its presence in the managed services market when it purchased Savvis in 2011. The service provider offers a line of managed hosting services and a suite of cloud services via a number of data centers located in key domestic U.S. markets, Asia-Pacific and Europe.

Savvis has continued to expand its capabilities through its own in-house initiatives and through strategic acquisitions of other cloud services providers such as Ciber, a move that enhanced its application support capabilities for its growing client base.

"Through its acquisition of the IT outsourcing business Ciber in July 2012, Savvis gained a broader set of enterprise application support skills, and could start bringing new application-centric services to customers," wrote Gartner. "Savvis has consistently had one of the best end-user portals, which generally covers every product that Savvis offers to customers, including hosting, network, cloud and colocation."

For all of its strengths, a number of Gartner's clients said that the series of acquisitions it conducted over the past two years had an effect on the "focus and quality of support within the business."

Other new potential customers considering Savvis will have to also deal with the reality that the service provider's data center capabilities are limited to two markets.

"Savvis only has European data centers in the U.K. and Germany, so it is unable to offer more regional data sovereignty than other managed hosting providers," wrote Gartner.