SaaS Demand Fuels Savvis Cloud Revenue

Savvis executives shed some light on the company’s cloud computing thrust during this week’s Q3 earnings. Much of the discussion revealed how software as a service (SaaS) is giving Savvis a lift.  Here are the highlights.

According to the conference call…

• Savvis cloud-related annual revenue run rate stands at $8 million.
• SaaS customers are among the largest consumers of the company’s cloud services. Savvis’ SaaS revenue has grown 36 percent year-over-year and the company views both SaaS and cloud as central to the company’s future growth.
• Savvis is moving into beta mode with Project Spirit, which the company bills as its next-generation cloud compute platform. Savvis announced Project Spirit last month.
• Phil Koen, chief executive officer of Savvis, said the company is in the process of releasing Project Spirit into a beta environment. He said the plan is to run the cloud offering in beta for a number of quarters as the company gains experience with customers scaling their operations across it. Koen added that “a number of beta customers” have signed up to use the service.

Savvis describes Project Spirit as providing a virtual private data center that lets customers select a service grade that fits the nature of the application they plan to run in the cloud. Koen said he envisions customers initially coming in at a lower grade of service and then migrating to a higher level as they move more core applications onto the platform.

Other managed services and colocation firms have reported cloud progress in recent months. Terremark Worldwide, for example, has been citing the government sector as an important source of cloud business.

An update on cloud could be forthcoming during Terremark’s quarterly conference call November 9.