Exodus snags Covisint deal
Riding aboard what could be just the ticket for its struggling fortunes, Exodus Communications Inc. will announce on Monday that it has been chosen to provide managed services and Web hosting for Covisint LLC, a global automotive e-business exchange.
Exodus will provide Covisint with its professional services, infrastructure, and security to enable the exchange company's U.S. and European membership to access tools for collaboration, transactions, procurement, and supply-chain and product development purposes, said Tom Hill, spokesman for Southfield, Mich.-based Covisint.
"We're talking about thousands of transactions and billions of dollars worth of activity [conducted through the exchange]," Hill said, citing the Web host's prior success with quickly ramping up Ford's auto exchange. "[Exodus] understood that Covisint needed them to be flexible," he added.
Only days removed from announcing a 15-percent cut in its work force, beating out competition such as Digex and UUNet to provide the platform and managed services for one of the largest exchanges in existence is a much-needed boost for Exodus, said Laurie McCabe, vice president and service director for Boston-based Summit Strategies.
McCabe said Web hosting companies are feeling the pinch after over-aggressively building out datacenter space to satisfy dot.coms and brick-and-mortars.
"The dot-com boom has busted, and the brick-and-mortars are less anxious about 'catching up' in the e-business race. Most datacenter vendors are having trouble filling their capacity," McCabe said. "It hurts more to lose a deal in bad times."
Covisint's primary datacenter site hosted by Santa Clara, Calif.-based Exodus is located in Oakbrook, Ill. A backup site used for quality assurance and testing of new applications resides in Austin, Texas, and the overseas datacenter sits in Amsterdam, Netherlands.
Launched last fall, Covisint is an organization serving the automotive industry and developed by DaimlerChrysler AG, Ford Motor Co., Nissan Motor Co. Ltd., General Motors Corp., Renault SA, Oracle Corp., and Commerce One Inc.
» posted by ITworld staff
InfoWorld
Symantec Backup Exec 12 and Backup Exec System Recovery 8 deliver industry leading Windows data protection and system recovery. Download this whitepaper to find out the top reasons to upgrade and how to get continuous data protection and complete system recovery.
Data and system loss — from a hard drive failure, malicious attack, natural disaster, or simple human error — can happen anytime. Don’t leave your business vulnerable. Make sure you have a secure recovery strategy in place. Symantec's latest backup and system recovery technology can efficiently restore critical applications, individual emails and documents and even restore your entire system in minutes in the event of a loss.
Businesses face a growing challenge to ensure that the IT environment is properly protected. Backup Exec 12 integrates with other applications in the Symantec family of products, to complement your current data protection strategy, keep your data securely backed up and make it recoverable when you need it most.
