The Savvis Blog

From CapEx to OpEx: How Hosting HANA Helps Move the Needle

2013-05-16T17:10:18Z

When it comes to deploying enterprise apps across vast geographies, why do the heavy lifting?

That's the question Savvis President Jeff Von Deylen posed when he delivered well-received remarks at this week's "CEO Viewpoints" session at SAPPHIRE NOW, SAP's annual conference in Orlando.

]]> Whether it's racking and stacking, troubleshooting provisioning or rolling out behind-the-scenes hardware updates, businesses face a complex set of steps and variables when introducing and managing software solutions at global scale.

Jeff discussed the appeal of hosting SAP HANA with Savvis. Companies, he said, want to take advantage of SAP HANA to improve how their businesses operate, but they stumble when it comes to deploying the infrastructure that supports the software solution.

With Savvis, the client makes the business case and its plan for utilizing SAP HANA, and we help take care of the rest. Hosting models help businesses get everything up and running quickly, all under a pay-as-you-go operating expense model. So there's no need for costly infrastructure expenses.

During the SAPPHIRE NOW conference, we've heard from dozens of executives who are interested in leveraging the SAP HANA platform but cannot move forward due to numerous logistical issues related to the infrastructure. To those in this spot, we can help. Why wait eight or nine months and spend precious capital when we can make the process easy?

Check out our webinar series for more details about how we are helping companies with SAP HANA.

Savvis President Jeff Von Deylen,

right, talks about hosted SAP HANA

during a "CEO Viewpoint" session

at SAPPHIRE NOW in Orlando, Fla.

Justin Lopinot is director, public relations, for Savvis, a CenturyLink company.

SAP HANA case studies show value of real-time access to data

2013-05-15T14:28:48Z

Reflecting on conversations that took place on the first day of the SAPPHIRE NOW conference in Orlando, Fla., it's become clear that SAP HANA's rapid access to data is revolutionizing what companies can do. Technology and marketing teams are dreaming up new ways to take advantage of near real-time access to data.

Below are a few case study examples - courtesy of SAP - that may just inspire you.

]]>

Aiding the Fight Against Cancer

Before HANA, it took two days to find differences in genome data between cancer patients and healthy people. This meant it took longer for hospitals that sequence genomes to make decisions. It also meant drug companies had less insight into patient data, slowing new discovery. MKI offers cloud-based genome analytic services and anticipates that, with SAP HANA, sequencing genomes will go from two days to 20 minutes.

Keeping Sales Reps Updated - and Clients Happy

Field sales representatives don't have easy access to warehouse inventory. Pulling reports often requires too much time, causing reps to go into meetings uninformed about which products are out of stock. Liquid Decisionsuses Predictive Analytics running on SAP HANA to provide real-time restock, cross-sell, up-sell and goal-related product recommendations to sales reps.

Relevantly Reaching the Right Audience

Companies are still searching for an elegant solution to the marketing personalization problem. The same offer is often sent to all customers, meaning it isn't always relevant or well-received. Powered by HANA, Audience Discovery & Targeting provides highly integrated data for an accurate target audience view. It provides a high performance end-to-end solution from modeling to list building, allowing marketers to optimize and refine messaging like never before.

Optimized Beer Drinking

Beverage consumption is notoriously hard to track in real time. It is nearly impossible to recognize trends or optimize pricing based on consumption. WeissBeerger uses on-premise sensors to monitor and accumulate consumption data of draught beer in bars, restaurants and hotels. This data is transmitted to cloud servers, allowing companies to assess and optimize advertising impact and enable dynamic pricing. Restaurants and bars can now offer discounts for specific timeframes and regions, helping keep the establishments and their patrons happy.

I am at SAPPHIRE NOW all week if you're interested in a hosted SAP HANA solution but are unsure how it can fit into your organization. Stop by booth #1732 or request an appointment.

Binoy James is director, hosting product management, at Savvis, a CenturyLink company.

Five perks to hosting SAP HANA with Savvis

2013-05-09T16:48:46Z

Sci-fi writer Arthur C. Clarke had three laws for the future - one of which immediately came to mind when SAP released HANA in 2011:

"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."

]]> SAP HANA is magic. It aggregates huge volumes of data in near-real time with no server zoo, no internal replication, no materialized aggregates and no stack of engines.

Its introduction opened up the doors to a host of applications that would never have been able to exist only months before. Location-based marketing delivers customized display offers within milliseconds to mobile consumers using their whereabouts and demographic profile. MKI is now able to sequence genomes in 20 minutes instead of 20 days, aiding in the fight against cancer.

For organizations looking to take advantage of this extreme speed, hosted HANA makes for even more magic - provided they choose the right service provider. Here are some of the top perks to hosting HANA with Savvis:

1. You can test drive HANA.

Savvis enables companies interested in seeing its capabilities to try before they buy. We offer a proof-of-concept implementation with your own data. The proof of concept will look just like a committed implementation, but afterward you will be ready to move right into production with HANA under a standard contract.

2. You can get started much faster.

A traditional HANA integration involves ordering machines to be custom-built from approved vendors, which can take about four months. We have HANA-certified machines ready so you can begin the implementation as soon as your contract is signed.

3. You'll optimize your costs.

Rather than paying to maintain servers, you're now licensing software. This moves shifts you from capital expenses into operating expenses, saving you a bundle.

4. We think ahead for you.

Savvis will keep track of your needs and recommend proactively when you need to add servers. This means you won't have to initiate the server building process months before you need the machines.

5. You'll never need to worry about migration again.

If you prefer, we can oversee the whole migration process from start to finish. Savvis and our partners have successfully migrated thousands of clients, and we will be able to suggest the safest and most efficient way to approach the project.

Still have questions about what SAP HANA can do? Stop by booth 1732 at Sapphire 2013 or request an apppointment.

Tim Beerman is vice president, hosting business unit, at Savvis, a CenturyLink company.

Dark Clouds: Getting Over Our Fear Of Cloud Access

2013-04-25T21:23:23Z

Wired.com runs a community called Innovation Insights, dedicated to "new thinking for a new era of technology." Earlier this week, I contributed this article on cloud security, reflecting on some of the interesting trends around cloud network access and the impact on customer adoption.

I encourage everyone to dig deeper when a colleagues reference "security concerns" as one of the reasons holding them back from public cloud adoption models. What are those concerns? Are you exposed to them today? And how do you mitigate risk?

]]> I've been impressed with some of the other content up there, so fire up your favorite reading app (mine is Pocket) and browse their library of content contributed by passionate Wired readers like you!

David Shacochis (@daveshac) is vice president of cloud platforms at Savvis, a CenturyLink company.

How secure is your cloud provisioning?

2013-04-10T17:02:33Z

Many cloud computing pundits state that cloud computing introduces a new method of Infrastructure-as-a-Service; however, that is just not the case.

Cloud computing introduces automation, orchestration, service provisioning/delivery and service management either initiated or through application programmable interfaces (APIs). The ability to secure these new capabilities is necessary.]]> To do so, ask your cloud provider these two top questions:

How do you secure your public API interface?
How do you segregate duties between the public interface and the automation, orchestration and service delivery of the cloud service's individual components?

For public interfaces, it is essential you leverage a web-service-aware firewall. Your cloud provider should provide you with its security architecture, including segregation of duties and any policies that govern the access and management of its environments.

It is also important you understand the provisioning flows, security at each provisioning interface and administrative boundaries. The top security threats are still internal threats.

In addition, cloud computing models in service today come with less-than- desirable security controls and practices than the existing hosting infrastructure provides. This is because traditional hosting infrastructure security controls do not map well to the new cloud service models.

Cloud computing also introduces new threat vectors, such as:

Virtualization architecture: Hypervisor management and architecture needs to be hardened as any OS layer requires.
Patching of virtualization software: Patching of the cloud software introduces a new threat vector if not kept up to date.
Immature system management tools: Segregation of duties for administrative activities and identity management.
Inter-virtual machine visibility: The hypervisor introduces a new virtual network layer inside the firewall boundary; however there is no visibility into that network.
Virtual machine mobility/escape: Hypervisors introduce new OS threat vectors, such as escaping into the network layer and penetrating the hypervisor.

Cloud computing service architectures must have well-defined policies and procedures to address these concerns and some compatibility with existing dedicated security controls.

Cloud security is an evolving threat landscape. The main threats we are actively tracking are the explosion of malware, hybrid cloud access control and authentication, and mobility/app marketplace advanced persistent threats.

Ask your cloud provider to provide the physical security controls, virtualization layer security controls and network layer security controls. Security controls for cloud services must be built into the service and not just an afterthought.

Ken Owens is chief scientist at Savvis, a CenturyLink company.

IT Outsourcing: Five Steps to Gaining Business Agility

2013-04-01T14:26:10Z

For years, IT leaders have been told that IT outsourcing can help them focus on their core competency. But under equally opposing pressures to roll out new technologies, make sense of the patchwork of self-service platforms deploying in the shadows and keep the computers running, it's a wonder they still have sight of what constitutes that core competency.

Here's a hint: Core competency isn't found in fixing servers and improving network connectivity. It lies in helping the business compete by selling more, delivering more and bringing more to the market.

]]> We've seen a dramatic shift in the business expectations for IT. Business leaders have seen the way technology can speed time-to-market. They've seen it transform customer service. They've seen the potential for new opportunities through improved business models. And they want in.

IT leaders face an interesting conundrum, though: As gatekeepers of the organization's legacy technologies and protocols, they're mired in task-oriented to-do lists that keep their IT environment up and running. This prevents them from leveraging the newest technologies that could allow them to solve their business's emerging needs. Technology is the solution and the problem at the same time.

Tech-savvy business leaders who can't afford to wait for IT to catch up are moving ahead at warp speed with self-service options that solve their business needs, thus further widening the chasm between the IT organization and everyone else.

The solution - and in fact, the opportunity - for IT is to focus on that core business competency: the making, selling and serving of goods. And the only way to do that is by letting go of some of the day-to-day technology operations.

In other words, to outsource it.

The trick to strategic outsourcing is knowing what operations to let go of. Here are five steps to creating a plan that aligns with business needs:

1. Engage business stakeholders. Set your priorities by asking leaders from across the organization what their needs are. Don't ignore a particular group because you don't think they play a strategic role in your company. They also have needs that technology can support, and if you don't do it, they will find someone who will.

2. Build a plan. Include a timeline, deliverables and milestones to help your outsourcing migration stay on track.

3. Set benchmarks. Measure success that is aligned with business requirements. Has your strategy helped the business reach more customers? Increase service speed or quality? Stakeholder priorities will help determine what needs benchmarking.

4. Pilot the program. Test the plan on a tactical operation and measure it against the benchmarks you've set out.

5. Look to the future. Examine where your business is headed in five to 10 years to determine which areas could benefit next from outsourcing. Discuss your plans and requirements with your outsourcing provider.

Outsourcing need not be an all-or-nothing proposition. In fact, it's often not. Fully outsourced IT organizations become that way over time, as IT leaders realize the opportunities that come with devoting more energy to business needs, such as building new marketing apps, maintaining secure websites or serving a growing customer base, and less on tasks like rolling out computer updates and maintaining server hardware.

In the end, getting the business to adopt a strategic technology framework takes leadership. To maintain their claim as the organization's technology advisors, IT executives must shift their thinking toward new models that drive innovation and respond flexibly to the needs of the business users and the market.

Brian Stillwell is senior director, global solutions management, ITO, at Savvis, a CenturyLink company.

Fueling business opportunity through interconnectivity

2013-03-26T15:14:18Z

Six years ago, businesses considering colocation wanted to know all about the physical infrastructure - the hardware, the cooling, the facility itself. While those features are still very relevant today, we're seeing a move toward conceptual, strategic needs driving colocation decisions.

No longer are businesses focused exclusively on what is in your data center. They also want to know who is in your data center and how relationships within this data center can support their high-level business objectives.

]]> These abstract, "virtual" reasons are now transcending the physical, and that's driving businesses to look at the data center less as a pure cost-management tool and more as a business-growth tool.

As businesses realize there's new opportunity in their service providers' date centers, interconnectivity between clients in our data centers is flourishing, fueling the development of ecosystems.

We've seen this dynamic interplay between businesses, carriers and software providers really take off in the financial services sector, and to bring that momentum to other arenas, we're making it easier for our clients to identify and interconnect with each other.

Today, we announced Savvis ClientConnect, a new opt-in tool that helps clients locate other participating clients within our data centers, generate new opportunities by promoting their presences, and order cross connects through which they can exchange and share data. This service is unique in that it will transcend across Savvis' colocation, managed and, eventually, cloud client base.

This is an important step in building greater interconnectivity and diversity across Savvis' global data center footprint. When clients connect with one another, they bring expanded capabilities and an offering to the marketplace over simple, cost-effective cross connects.

For IT leaders looking to drive value back into their businesses, this is a powerful proposition that takes data center discussions beyond the hardware into the realm of strategic revenue objectives. We look forward to rolling this service out to our clients. Log in to the SavvisStation Portal to sign up.

Drew Leonard is vice president, colocation product management, at Savvis, a CenturyLink company.

IT security: A managed approach for financial services

2013-03-25T13:49:04Z

Every week, it seems, we hear about another attack on IT security in the financial services sector. This heightened awareness has firms taking extensive in-house precautions to raise firewalls, lock down apps and servers, and pursue other best-practice strategies.

But under the strain of constant threats and rapid evolution of new technologies, IT leaders can't help but wonder: Is what I'm doing enough?

]]>

The list of potential risks is ever expanding, making it virtually impossible to keep tabs on everything. While it's tempting to build walls of protection, current business technology needs and trends pose direct conflict to isolation strategies.

Cloud, social media and mobile devices are too efficient and prevalent in the current workforce. They present opportunities for doing business better, and as enablers of technology, IT leaders can't afford to roadblock demands for easy access to the tools of today.

How do we, as our organization's technology leaders, balance the needs of the business to pursue opportunities with the needs to protect it from threats? One solution is to approach IT security as a managed service.

Security technologies are expensive and always evolving. It's not enough that IT leaders stay on top of the trends. They must also maintain a strong staff that's equipped to provide the level of quality protection financial customers expect from the firms they do business with. Security as a service can help protect these firms from the next string of threats.

Download our new whitepaper for a deeper look at how managed security services can help arm financial service firms in today's threat environment.

Tony Kroell is vice president, product marketing, financial services, with Savvis, a CenturyLink company.

Meet Slough's newest data center

2013-03-07T16:43:22Z

NBC's "The Office" is set on Slough Avenue in tribute to the town of Slough, England, the launch pad for Ricky Gervais' comedic career as the star in the original UK show of the same name.

Five years after Gervais left Slough, Savvis moved in, opening the L01 data center in 2008 to help transform what is now Europe's biggest trading business park. Demand was high from day one, and within 18 months, the first floor sold out. In 2010, we expanded.

This week marks the opening of our second Slough data center, Savvis LO5.

]]> The addition doubles capacity across our two Slough data centers, raising floor space by a third to give businesses in the European market access to the best experience possible.

By expanding the campus rather than moving to a new location, Savvis is able to build up the IT load incrementally to match demand, while becoming more efficient. LO5 offers an initial 2.4 megawatts of IT load on 35,000 square feet of raised floor space. It is designed to support power densities in excess of 150 watts per square foot. The adjoining Savvis data center expands our operations on the Slough campus to 100,000 square foot, with a spread of 8.88 megawatts of power.

While Ricky may have moved out of his office a decade ago, Slough is now home to the highest concentration of European headquarters in the UK. We chose it, following extensive research of 75 possible locations in the region, because it is considered the 'Data Center of England' thanks, in part, to its power connectivity.

This is a strategic geographical location for a wide variety of businesses in the financial services, consumer brands and other sectors. With this week's addition of LO5, we're proud to be supporting these companies with the carrier diversity, interconnectivity and other IT infrastructure services they need to compete effectively in the global market place. See what Savvis LO5 can do for you.

Ian Butler is vice president, EMEA, for Savvis, a CenturyLink company.

Industrializing big data

2013-02-27T14:58:27Z

It's no secret that as companies' information assets continue to explode, the need to unlock the value of data grows more pressing.

This week, Intel announced the availability of the Intel® Distribution for Apache Hadoop software (Intel® Distribution), which will give more organizations the ability to make use of the vast amounts of data that are generated, collected and stored. I was pleased to participate in the event and extend a longstanding successful alliance with Intel and the other companies on stage.

]]> It became clear to me during this process that the companies participating in Intel's announcement - Cisco, SAP RedHat and of course Savvis - understand that making sense of big data will have profound potential to unleash new discoveries, business models and insights about customer experiences. They also understand that structuring big data solutions that can capture, store and process large volumes of diverse data can be highly complex and must deliver on the demanding requirements of enterprise-grade performance, security, scalability and manageability.

The Intel Distribution is built from the silicon up to deliver industry-leading performance and security to better use big data. Enterprises require an open, innovative Apache Hadoop platform that integrates industrialized performance and capabilities as well as a thriving ecosystem that can deliver end-to-end integrated solutions.

We understand scale, speed, reliability and security. Mining nascent information across multiple systems, applications and geographies, and turning that information into decision criteria requires all of these attributes. Designing a solution for big data from the silicon up will better allow our customers to unlock the promise of big data while satisfying their needs for reliability, security and scale.

Our high-powered infrastructure solutions offer robust security options, enterprise-grade global storage capabilities and highly available compute power in a cloud-based economic model to address the dynamic data requirements of big data. Big data solutions require bandwidth (a` la networking) and integration with legacy environments at which Savvis excels. Many organizations already trust us with their mission-critical information. Today's announcement makes it possible for them do more with it.

Steve Garrou is vice president, global solutions management, at Savvis, a CenturyLink company.

IT strategy: Aligning technology trends with business objectives

2013-02-26T15:04:35Z

The changing role of IT: It's a topic steadily gaining steam, as cloud-driven applications and infrastructure services converge with today's tech-savvy workforce and shifting business landscape.

These trends are not foreign to most technology leaders. But they are escalating in intensity, giving rise to new business needs and opportunities, and that's demanding we all rethink the way IT does IT.

]]> Savvis recently hosted a webinar that explored the forces of change in today's businesses and how those changes translate to the IT organization. One of the clearest takeaways from guest speaker James Staten, vice president, principal analyst with Forrester Research, was that meaningful business solutions cannot come from infrastructure alone.

We must build IT strategies around the needs of our businesses. Staten identified three business areas where IT can act as a strategic player:

- m-Commerce

- Self-service applications

- Big-data analytics

Each area holds implications for how companies approach their content management, optimize their infrastructure, and invest in cloud and hosting arrangements. But without IT's holistic view, businesses can miss key factors for channeling their investments to the right places.

I encourage those who may have missed this webinar and are interested in seeing what these mega-business trends look like for the IT organization to listen to our archived stream.

This is essential information for anyone wanting to build IT strategies around the core competencies of their business. In the coming months, we'll be taking a deeper look at how IT can leverage its expertise to drive value with webinars focused on areas such as enterprise applications, infrastructure optimization, big data and content management. Watch Savvis online for dates and times.

Brian Mistretta is senior director, practice area marketing, with Savvis, a CenturyLink company.

Media organizations must embrace a mobility mash-up

2013-02-18T17:20:08Z

Consider: 5.1 billion people on the planet own a mobile phone - only 4.2 billion own a toothbrush.

In today's media organizations, user experience is almost as important as the content itself. Compelling content means nothing if the user experience is poor, and the 'it just works' expectation set by the likes of Facebook and Google means content must be delivered in the right way more now than ever before.

]]> Five seconds or less is the time a mobile phone user will wait for a page to load, according to Equation Research, yet 77 percent of top companies' mobile sites exceed this limit.

The first objective of any modern media strategy should be to mobilize existing content, preferably through dedicated mobile applications rather than via a browser. A shrink-to-fit approach to smaller screens just isn't sufficient to grab and hold consumers' attention.

The foundation for any multiplatform strategy must do two things:

1) Meet peaks in demand through cloud enablement

2) Meet customers' performance expectations through application performance management.

Cloud's elasticity makes it the obvious choice for a multiplatform foundation. The media industry is actually ahead of the curve on cloud adoption; many content providers already have a private cloud behind their organizational firewall. Others adopt a "rent first, buy as a last resort" approach to compute resource and have well-established arrangements with third-party infrastructure providers.

A hybrid approach offers the best of both. A hybrid cloud allows organizations to obtain extra capacity from the public side during spikes in demand, while keeping mission-critical services and data within the organization's private cloud.

Using this method, organisations can build agility and controllability into their back-end IT without the huge demands on capital expenditure.

The media industry has an appetite like few others for storage, processing, analytics and management resources. Publishers, media buyers and search providers rely on clicks for a consistent, global measure of value in their activities. This is growing the volume of data for analysis -- especially as the value of media assets change rapidly over time.

The cloud not only offers the compute and storage resources that media companies need to deliver content. It also helps organizations analyze massive amounts of data for insights into user behavior and advertising space.

As traditional media revenue models falter, there is a tendency for some organizations to perceive consumers - with their expectations for free content and file sharing -- as the enemy.

However, the real threat for content providers is growing complexity. Consumers are no longer prepared to fit their lives around linear broadcast schedules or someone else's business model. Social networking has made complex, adaptive demand for media an everyday phenomenon.

The cloud, without doubt, offers the best single platform available for exchanging and evolving media with multiple audiences, using multiple devices in multiple contexts under multiple business models. With great potential to shape the future of the industry, cloud offers exciting opportunities for content providers and broadcasters to transact in real-time with their audience, socially or commercially.

Consider cloud your digital assembly line for delivering large-scale customization of media and advertising services to those in charge -- the consumers. A cloud-enabled media strategy is not just a matter of having the right infrastructure -- it's about delivering the right tools, the right controls and the right user experience.

Andrew McCreath is cloud director, EMEA, for Savvis, a CenturyLink company.

What stood out at Cloud Expo Europe

2013-02-12T15:15:44Z

Just back from a trip to Europe - the perfect rally point for meeting with many of our European customers to discuss how they are using our growing London-based cloud platform and how Savvis should prioritize its development backlog.

We were also able to meet with a number of industry analysts Cloud Expo Europe and update them on some exciting new developments inside the Savvis Cloud, such as our Symphony Cloud Storage offering and the savvisdirect project.

]]> Whilst a broad range of cloud technology was represented at the show, a few key trends stood out:

Cloud Derby: One of the questions that kept coming up in our discussions was a variant of the old horse track greeting: "Who do you like?" We heard a variant of this question from any number of industry analysts, enterprise cloud buyers, and software vendors at the event. Will Hyper-V win out? What will VMware do to stay ahead? OpenStack or CloudStack? Who can challenge AWS? We heard, in a British accent, the hypervisor horse race handicapped in so many ways, I thought I was listening to an old Eddy Izzard bit. It started to become clear what the driver was behind this line of discussion - customers still want to build their own private clouds, they just want to pick the one with the most optionality in the public cloud market. "Winning" the hybrid cloud race is all about options and tight integration.

Where's My App For That?: There were a number of discussions around the application lifecycle space, with the clear desire for a "vending machine" type approach to common business applications in public and private clouds. There is a growing realization that bit-based application packaging can only scale so far, and many organizations are re-thinking their release management processes and application modeling technologies to enable adaptive enterprise app stores. (Ran into our old friend @jyung99 with Appcara, and they're doing some interesting things in this space.)

Heavy Metal: There were a number of allusions to the continued need for bare metal architectures, especially in big data use cases. It remains to be seen how long it will take computer science to optimize all software workloads for virtualized, scale-out cloud platforms. In the significant mean-time, physical environments are being considered a prime candidate for data center automation, orchestration, and workload scheduling. There is a growing sense that, in the enterprise, cloud essential characteristics can be met through resource pooling and automation - without necessarily using the hypervisor.

Colo... And?: There were numerous colocation providers at the show, some sophisticated and others nascent. All providers are starting to realize that, in order to justify the fixed commitment of a colocation contract, many enterprise buyers want to know what else they can get access to. Some providers are responding with matching engines that help buyers get access to other networks and clouds, others are pitching house-branded cloud services. It's becoming clear that enterprise colocation is being evaluated on what types of other services can be "AND-ed" on to the environment.

When the Americans come over to the UK to talk shop, some of them tend to get in hot water. But not our global-minded team - Savvis knows the European market well, and with our recent expansion to Frankfurt, Germany, is poised to have a strong, growing presence for years to come.

David Shacochis is vice president, cloud platforms, for Savvis, a CenturyLink company.

Five Questions with Mozido's Steve Bacastow

2013-01-17T14:55:26Z

Mobile payments: The new frontier? Possibly, if you read the analyst reports. Yesterday, Forrester predicted the mobile payment market in the United States alone will reach $90 billion transactions by 2017.

This week, cloud-based mobile payments provider Mozido revealed plans to leverage Savvis' cloud and IT hosting solutions for its mobile payments platform.

We sat down with Steve Bacastow, senior vice president of operations at the Austin-based company, to talk about how outsourcing to the cloud aligns with Mozido's tailored solutions for global and regional brands in financial services, consumer packaged goods, telecommunications and retail.

]]> Steve, an expert in the alignment of IT with business strategy, recently joined Mozido, leading all operations functions with a focus on maximizing growth and profitability and meeting compliance standards. He previously served as senior vice president of service and delivery at CorFire, where he led the successful launch and certification of the first commercial Trusted Service Manager in North America supporting the Google Wallet.

Here's what he had to say about driving mobile payments into the next frontier with the help of Savvis' cloud:

Q: Tell us about Mozido. How does the company use IT outsourcing?

A: Mozido is a mobile technology company leveraging a sophisticated cloud-computing infrastructure to deliver consumer-facing solutions to target enterprise segments including: merchants, banks, payment processors, mobile network operators and consumer packaged goods. We use IT outsourcing to augment and extend our internal IT capabilities.

Q: What led Mozido to cloud computing?

A: Cloud computing allows us to scale quickly in the agile mobile payment ecosystem without giving up quality or security.

Q: How has cloud improved and impacted your company's technology platform?

A: Our technology platform was engineered to leverage a cloud-based deployment model. We picked Savvis because of their global reach, high security and unique private-cloud offerings.

Q: What benefits are you anticipating end-users will see from cloud solutions?

A: End users are going to experience Mozido services that are always available and highly responsive to the use cases that are important to them.

Q: What advice do you have for other companies considering cloud?

A: Do your homework and select a company that can meet your needs today and can scale to meet your future needs.

IT infrastructure in 2013, part II: The view from Savvis

2013-01-07T16:21:19Z

Where will you be one year from today? Where will your IT organization be? What do you need to know to get there?

Last week, Savvis experts weighed in on what 2013 has in store for interoperability in the cloud, data centers that do more than house data, and growing pressures on developers and the financial industry, respectively.

]]> In this second look at the future, we dive into global growth trends, hybrid cloud, ecosystems and more for insight that helps you align your IT organization wisely.

Here's our look at the future, part II:

Hybrid cloud, app libraries drive opportunity

Hybrid cloud will drive 2013, as enterprises look for providers with extensive, interoperable offerings. We also will see developers taking advantage of application libraries that offer a secure, reliable and agile application development platform.

- Ken Owens, CTO cloud, Savvis

Hurricane Sandy lessons go global

Hurricane Sandy in the United States has been an unfortunate reminder to the disruptive impact that can result from environmental disasters - something that companies and countries across Asia Pacific have also experienced in recent times. Increasingly, customers are seeing cloud as a way to cost-effectively deliver upon business continuity objectives. High-availability and disaster-recovery solutions will become important topics as more organizations investigate using cloud for their core business applications.

- Mark Smith, managing director, Savvis Asia

SaaS a focus for big data

As mid-sized customers move more toward Software-as-a-Service for SAP, Oracle and others, big data and legal requirements will drive managed storage. SAP will increasingly move appliances to HANA, demanding the industry develop a delivery model.

- Donald Badoux, managing director, Savvis Germany

Colo continues global growth

Colocation services will continue to grow globally, with Asia Pacific becoming the fastest-growing market as North America remains the largest. Colocation providers will focus on interconnectivity for their colocation data centers by implementing web-marketplace-based ecosystems as well as BC/DR planning, testing and execution, using lessons learned from Hurricane Sandy.

- Drew Leonard, vice president, colocation product management, Savvis

Financial services dig deep into data

As the financial service sector capitalizes on big data, businesses in this industry will seek out platforms such as Hadoop, NoSQL and MongoDB that offer real-time, low-latency analytics for collecting large volumes of data about clients, products and services. The use of big data analytics for risk analysis, cost cutting and product development will expand to the industry's broader trends, problems and opportunities.

- Nick Brooks, product marketing director, financial services, Savvis EMEA

Cloud gathers in Canada

In the past few years, Canadian organizations have exhibited a tepid response to cloud IaaS, and much of this hesitancy can be tied to the lack of enterprise cloud IaaS offerings on Canadian soil. In 2013, Canadian organizations will start to test drive various offerings from global providers that have made the concerted effort and investment to deploy in-country cloud services. We will see more organizations taking measured approaches towards public and hybrid cloud scenarios without data-sovereignty concerns.

- Bik Dutta, director of market development, Savvis Canada

A new paradigm embraced for IT decision making

Enterprises that deploy and use their own assets will continue in 2013 to be tethered by costs, slower times to market and limited agility to meet their growth demands. As they look to blend current investments in people, tools, hardware and software, they'll find IT service models that move them closer to a new paradigm of resource utility and flexible commercial terms. They will choose models that offer variable computing power, integration-ready services and flexible service-level agreements. Service providers that bridge the technical and business gap and help enterprises focus on how to best apply IT resources will end up gaining share and providing the greatest value.

- Steve Garrou, vice president, global solutions management, Savvis