Savvis now operates under the brand CenturyLink Technology Solutions three years after the colo outfit was bought by the US telecoms giant.

Jeff Von Deylen, president of CenturyLink Technology Solutions, said: “While we are extremely proud of our nearly 20-year legacy operating as Savvis within the industry, we value CenturyLink’s extensive market leadership and look forward to operating under one brand to continue helping businesses become more agile, secure and sustainable with integrated solutions that deliver bottom-line results.”

In an interview with FOCUS, Becky Carr, CMO at Centurylink Technology Solutions offered insight into the objectives, process and thinking behind the brand change.

“It is very important to align under one brand. Maintaining a brand is very expensive and we took a very analytical approach to this. Savvis did a lot of brand recognition studies and in the US the Centurylink brand has a lot of personas, internationally it is a different challenge as it more about introducing the brand.”

“We want to own the cloud and hybrid solutions space by providing technology solutions across the full array of hybrid infrastructure and services. And we want to be top of mind. In the US we’re number two in colocation provision, number four in managed hosting and number eight in the cloud.”

Three categories

Carr categorizes the market into three types. These are pure players who are niche colo companies, there are global telecoms players and there are the systems integrators. The interesting things are happening where a portfolio is being built out.

“It is on one thing to host a workload or put it in the cloud. It is the access to that data for employees, customers and partners that provides value. We are absolutely accountable for end to end delivery whether in one data center or replicated across multiple sites,” she says.

Risk

Given the patchy reputation of large telecoms companies in the enterprise systems space aligning an enterprise services brand with a large established telecoms company is not without its risks.
Carr acknowledged this saying: “I’ve been in the telecoms market and had different experiences. There are a lot of risk factors anytime you transition a brand. Big telecoms will suck up a cool innovative hybrid cloud company and rip it apart. But the reason I came here is that Centurylink Technology Solutions will have its own and significantly more capital investment through Centurylink. This [brand change] is not signaling further integration. We will be using the Savvis name a portfolio descriptor – it is not totally going away,” says Carr.
Success of the brand change and execution will be measured against the division’s stated target of exceeding market growth rates.

Centurylink bought Savvis in April 2011 for $2.5bn three months after Verizon announced it would buy Terremark for $1.4bn.