Backbone Directory: SAVVIS

Thanks to its 2004 purchase of the assets of Cable & Wireless, SAVVIS now houses a quarter of the global Internet route.

by Jeff Goldman [February 9, 2005]

SAVVIS was founded in 1995 as the regional Internet service provider DiamondNet, which offered a variety of network-based private VPN services. The company changed its name to SAVVIS in 1996, and went public in 2000. In March of 2004, SAVVIS acquired the assets of Cable & Wireless, including their CWA (Cable & Wireless America) network,

current network status

As a result, the company now houses fully 25 percent of the Internet route globally, according to Ron Dobes, SAVVIS's General Manager of Network Products and Services. "Globally, we still have a larger footprint with the legacy SAVVIS infrastructure in place, but Cable & Wireless gave us the Internet presence, primarily domestically and in Europe, and we're in an ongoing exercise to further integrate those over time," he says.

The SAVVIS network covers 110 cities in 45 countries, including the U.S., Canada, Latin America, Europe, the Middle East, Asia, and the Pacific Rim. The network includes 21,000 managed network endpoints, a 17,000-mile OC192 U.S. fiber backbone, and 24 data centers in the U.S., U.K., Singapore, and Japan.

Using the slogan The Network that Powers Wall Street^SM, SAVVIS now serves more than 4,700 financial institutions, including 75 of the top 100 banks and 45 of the top 50 brokerage firms worldwide. Still, 70 percent of SAVVIS's customer base is comprised of non-financial enterprises.

Customers have five QoS levels to choose from:

Service Type	Application Type	Example
Real-Time	Delay Intolerant	Financial Market Data
Multimedia	Delay and Jitter Sensitive	Video Conferencing, Voice
Production	Delay Sensitive	Database, CRM, ERP
Classic	Delay Tolerant	File Transfer, E-mail
Internet	Best Effort	Web Browsing

A key focus for SAVVIS is its virtualized network offering, which allows a client to minimize hardware requirements and simply purchase server space and solutions as needed. As a result, Dobes contends, a company's internal IT costs can be cut in half, upfront costs for implementation are virtually eliminated, and new services can be turned up in a matter of minutes. Those services can include anything from Microsoft Exchange to a virtual firewall.

Industry awards received by the company include the 2003 American Business Awards' "Stevie" for Best Customer Service Organization, a 100 percent uptime rating in Network World Magazine's 2002 "Battle of the ISP Backbones," and a 2002 Boardwatch Magazine Service Provider Excellence Award for its Intelligent HostingSM Area Network.

Corporate Contact Info:

Executive: Rob McCormick, Chairman and CEO
Corporate Address: 1 SAVVIS Parkway, St. Louis, MO 63017
Corporate Telephone: 314-628-7000
Toll Free Telephone: 1-800-SAVVIS1
Technical Support / NOC: 1-888-NETOPS-1 / noc@savvis.net
Sales: 703-234-8000 / sales@savvis.net
Financial: NASDAQ - SVVS
ISP Services: Products
Press Releases: Newsroom