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NEWS
Mar 27th 2000: IBM is to build 28 new Internet data centres for Qwest Communications, in an alliance the two companies estimate will earn them a combined $5bn over the next seven years. The move advances Qwest's Web and application hosting presence, while sidelining its long-standing relationship with IBM rival Hewlett-Packard. Last week, HP aligned with Microsoft to announce a new bundled offering for service providers. IBM Global Services will build the new Qwest facilities over the next three years and will provide operational support. It is to act as the anchor tenant of the 100,000+ sq ft units, populating as much as a quarter of the available space with hosted systems for its own customer base. Qwest's part of the bargain is to provide high-performance broadband Internet connectivity to link the network of data centres, dubbed "CyberCenters", as well as existing IBM facilities. The new relationship will give Qwest a total of 42 data centres in the USA and Canada, with fourteen of them planned to be operational by the end of this year. The two companies claimed today their alliance would offer "the widest spectrum of e-business services ever to be offered under one roof," ranging from colocation, through complex Web hosting, to ASP infrastructure hosting. Linking into the Qwest network will enable the partners to offer end-to-end service level agreements, they added. Qwest's alliance with the world's biggest IT services business will give its ASP division, Qwest Cyber.Solutions (QCS), renewed competitive advantage, said Lew Wilks, Qwest's president of Internet and Multimedia Markets, briefing journalists today. "We will have our customers online more quickly with higher levels of service-level guarantees," he asserted. In a separate announcement last week (Mar 23rd), QCS announced a strategic relationship with BMC Software to incorporate the application management vendor's technology into a new service assurance offering. And earlier this month (Mar 16th), Qwest announced a partnership to distribute its Internet access and ASP services through leading technology wholesaler Tech Data Corp's channel of more than 100,000 resellers and systems integrators. Authorised Cisco, Microsoft and Hewlett-Packard partners will have access to the Qwest services. The IBM alliance did not impact Qwest's longstanding relationship with world number-three computer company Hewlett-Packard, Wilks told ASP News Review. "My agreement with HP was predominantly focussed on server and storage capabilities in the marketplace," he said. The agreement with IBM is platform neutral and includes support for HP, Sun and other vendors' equipment in Qwest's data centres, he explained. But the strength of Qwest's new relationship with IBM is likely to be seen as a setback for HP, which last year had aligned itself closely with the telecoms carrier and its ASP ambitions (see related story HP fuels surge to 'apps-on-tap' - May 19th, 1999). Likewise, IBM's close allegiance to Qwest may be viewed askance by its other ASP and ISP partners. Meanwhile HP last week (Mar 22nd) tightened its relationship with Microsoft, announcing a multi-year agreement to market prepackaged Service Provider-in-a-Box (SP-in-a-Box) solutions based on Microsoft server technology (see internetnews.com story Industry giants team to offer ASPs over Net). The bundles target service providers who want to offer Internet-based applications and other online services, and incorporate HP hardware platforms and service-level management software.
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