Jim Ousley, CEO of Savvis has moved to refute reports that his company has hired an investment banking company to advise it in talks with potential suitors. 

The company boss said that he has never spoken with Qatalyst Partners, a San Francisco based investment bank which had been identified as the advisor by several web sites. 

In an interview with Dow Jones Newswires Ousley said that he didn't know how these rumours started and that he'd 'never spoken to those people.'

The story broke on PEhub.com on Friday, a private equity web site and was picked up by others in the data center sector. 

In February, in an interview with Datacenterdynamics Jim Ousley said that Savvis was among a handful of players in the sector that operated at scale and that Telcos needed to get into the cloud market. 

DCDF: What about further consolidation: Do you foresee telecoms companies buying more data center players.

JO: It is a relatively small sector ÔÇô really only three or four companies of scale ÔÇô with over a billion dollars in business. If you look at network and cloud services, either the Telcos will do it themselves or consider acquisitions. Companies like ourselves have solid business plans and we are not in a position where we need them. However they do bring capital. Telecoms do need to get into the market [for cloud.]

The full interview is here.