NaviSite's Big Week: New Cloud Services Node Opens, New Owner on Way

SAN JOSE, Calif.-It was interesting timing that cloud services and managed hosting provider NaviSite turned on a major new asset-the West Coast node of its own cloud system-one day after Time Warner Cable agreed to acquire the company for $230 million.

A trend appears to be starting, one that involves telecoms and cable providers going into the cloud computing services business. Primarily, they're competing with Amazon, which owns the lion's share of the market. Verizon announced on Jan. 28 that it is buying Terremark Worldwide for $1.4 billion.

It's almost a no-brainer. Companies like Verizon, Time Warner Cable, AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile and British Telecom already have the physical setup and expertise to handle an extension of the business like this.

So it's entirely possible that other independent cloud service providers-and there aren't that many more large ones around-might be next up.

Will Comcast be the next buyer?

"Cable companies are increasingly offering Internet and communications services to small- and mid-size businesses [SMBs]," strategic IT analyst and consultant Jeff Kaplan of THINKStrategies wrote in his blog. "They have generally penetrated SMBs via the small-office/home-office [SOHO] market with services that are not much different from their consumer services.

"As consumers and corporations become fixated on cloud services, the opportunity to bridge the gap between these two markets has never been greater."

Kaplan said he thinks Comcast may be the next player to make a move into the data center and cloud computing realm, "unless its NBC Universal acquisition proves to be too much of a distraction."

Meanwhile, NaviSite staged a ribbon-cutting grand-opening event Feb. 2 around its impressive 25,000-square-foot, SAS 70 (Statement on Auditing Standard 70)-certified NaviCloud data center, which along with a number of hosted service customers also houses several cloud pods-including a six-rack pod specifically for its new services offerings.

NaviCloud runs on Cisco's UCS infrastructure, which is configured with dual-fabric interconnects for high availability. VMware's vSphere 4.1 provides the scalable cloud operating system.

Everything on the system is redundant or double-redundant; NaviSite CTO Denis Martin described the system as having "coast-to-coast failover."

You can view a video tour of NaviSite's San Jose data center on its Website.

The market for cloud computing is expected to reach nearly $150 billion by 2014-up from $68.3 billion last year, researcher Gartner has projected.