Verizon Expands Managed Hosting
By Justin Lee, theWHIR.com
September 14, 2006 – (WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — For hosting providers targeting small businesses or individual users, specialization is often a selling point. But for managed Web hosts serving enterprise customers, diversity of skills and offerings is a prerequisite.
According to a 2004 Forrester report entitled “Firms Plan to Maintain Windows, Add Linux OS,” enterprises employ an average of 2.6 different operating systems and plan to increase the number they support. The same report reveals that companies with two or more different operating systems had plans to install systems running additional different operating platforms.
IT solutions provider Verizon Business (verizonbusiness.com) set out to meet the technological demands of enterprises employing multiple operating systems, announcing on Wednesday it now supports five of the world’s most widely deployed computer operating systems.
“Were continuing to expand the platforms that we support in our portfolio to align with our customers’ technology needs and to align with the services that our customers are asking us to perform,” says Chris Gesell, director of product marketing for IT solutions at Verizon Business.
Already providing support for the Microsoft Windows Server, Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Sun Solaris systems platforms, Verizon Business has upgraded its infrastructure to now include support for IBM’s AIX and Hewlett-Packard’s UX.
The support will include essential IP application hosting services such as hardware maintenance, software administration, patching, monitoring and backups. The company says it will also provide support for common applications such as Web and application servers and database software.
“Historically, hosting was very much a public IP application-focused service,” says Gesell. “We want to continue to drive the convergence of private networking capabilities with our hosting assets, and we believe by offering AIX and UX it will allow us to do that.
Business can help ensure that critical business applications such as Web-enabled enterprise resource planning and customer relationship management applications can be accessed throughout changing enterprise landscapes.
“Customers are still running heterogeneous environments,” says Gesell. “Running these heterogeneous environments is causing challenges on their side. One, from a complexity perspective in that they have to maintain the intellectual knowledge and capital to maintain these systems; and two, it becomes a fairly significant resource strain on them to manage these multiple operating system platforms.”
Gesell says that Verizon Business’ new AIX and UX platform support enables its clientele to fully remedy these financial and technological hurdles, saving their business both time and money.
“What were doing here is shielding the customer from that complexity and freeing up their resources that focus in on their business critical issues and applications, and not worry about the baseline infrastructure operating systems necessary to run these applications.”
