The President of Savvis, Bill Fathers, is leaving the company in mid-March 2013.

The news follows his promotion to the role in February last year.

Savvis has not supplied a reason for his departure, but said its SVP Jeff Von Deylen has already taken over as President and Fathers will stay on for the change over until his last day.

Fathers was previously the SVP and global head of sales and marketing for Savvis, which was acquired by Centurylink in July 2011 for US$2.5bn.

The deal saw CentruyLink integrate its hosting business with Savvis operations.

In this role Fathers oversaw the strategic direction of the company and its go-to-market initiatives and sales execution.

Savvis said Fathers has been a driving force in its global market strategy, especially with product initiatives designed for the financial services, media and telecommunications markets.

“In every position he’s held, Bill has exhibited strong leadership,”Savvis CEO Jim Ousley said when Fathers was first appointed.

“Savvis’ international presence and market share have grown significantly through his efforts. As president, Bill will further focus on pursuing these alliances in addition to his existing responsibilities to help insure our position as a leader in global managed hosting and cloud services. It will also allow me more time to pursue additional strategic initiatives around the world.”

An engineer by trade, Fathers worked as an officer in the British Army and also helped build Thomson Reuter’s business in international markets for ten years.

Before Fathers was President, Savvis announced a partnership with Thomson Reuters to jointly provide vendor-neutral hosting services for financial trading at six Savvis-operated data centers in the US, Europe and Asia.

During Father’s time as President, the company has made a number of global expansion announcements.

In September 2011 Savvis announced the expansion of its North American facilities in Atlanta, Boston and Toronto and opened two new data centres in Seattle and Piscataway, New Jersey, adding 100,000 sq ft to its portfolio and brining tis global footprint to 2m sq ft.

In April 2012 Savvis formed a JV with Digital Realty to buy a 165,000 sq ft property in near downtown Hong Kong  and in May this year it opened up a new data center in London’s Docklands and in September took out 400 sq m of caged space at Interxion Frankfurt to serve the growing European market.