Savvis jumps into the SaaS bandwagon

Managed hosting service provider, Savvis Inc., has made three significant announcements related
to SaaS. They have jumped into the SaaS bandwagon by announcing a service for
ISVs (Independent Software Vendors). They are leveraging the presence of their 29 data
centers around the world, to offer a packaged plan that will help ISVs shift
gears and offer their products as a SaaS based offering. They announced a business alliance with
virtualization and automation software provider, Parallels. They also tied up
with Seattle based Skytap
Inc. to resell virtual lab service so that Savvis customers can test their
apps in the cloud before they move it to the production level. In this post, I will dissect their announement and see what it means for ISVs.

Savvis is trying to convince ISVs to move to their infrastructure and,
then, lock them in with a multi-pronged service offerings including managed
hosting and other outsourced services. They tap into their vast and
geographically distributed data centers to offer reliable and highly scalable
hosting solutions. They take advantage of OS level virtualization offered by
Parallels Virtuozzo Containers to help ISVs achieve the necessary scalability
and multi-tenancy. Even though this offering will be cheaper than running a data
center on their own, it is still very expensive compared to the offerings like
Amazon EC2. This will still be
attractive for those ISVs who are not willing to spend their time and resources
managing the virtual infrastructure and its security.

Along with the managed hosting service, Savvis also offers help migrating the
Client-Server Apps of ISVs to the virtualized, scalable environment offered in
the Savvis plan. This along with their suite of Life Cycle services, which
includes development, integration, delivery and operations of ISV’s
applications, essentially helps ISVs get a full featured package
of outsourced services and managed hosting infrastructure, thereby, serving as a
one stop shop for all their needs.

Their tie-up with Skytap allows Savvis to offer the ISVs a virtual lab where
they can test their applications before they are released in the production
environment. Skytap Virtual Lab provides virtualized infrastructure, including
hardware, storage and networking resources. It also includes vast library of
major operating systems, databases and other application software. This cloud
based virtual labs takes the heavy expenditure out of the ISV’s budget, usually
allocated to spend on the infrastructure needed for application development, QA,
IT Ops testing, training and demo.

Savvis’ strategy to lock in the ISVs into their infrastructure also includes
a marketplace platform that offers easy integration between various services
offered by different Savvis customers. ISVs can leverage the local and global high speed
connectivity optimized for SaaS delivery in this marketplace platform to offer
integrated SaaS offerings from a wide variety of available applications. This
ecosystem will help SaaS ISVs achieve higher profitability and thereby ensuring
that Savvis keeps the ISVs locked in to their services for a long period of
time.

Even though this announcement by Savvis appears like a cloud computing
offering, it is nothing more than a highly scalable managed hosting coupled with
other outsourced services and a marketplace. It may not be comparable to EC2 or
similar services offered by other vendors in terms of cost savings but the
additional services offered by Savvis will be attractive to many ISVs worried
about maintaining the reliability of their offerings as they migrate from a
client-server architecture to the cloud based one.