Exodus snags Covisint deal

by Brian Fonseca

May 14, 2001 —

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.

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