10:45 AM -- Savvis (Nasdaq: SVVS)'s cloud services partnership with Virgin Media Business Ltd. is paying off, according to Neil Cresswell, managing director for EMEA (Europe, Middle East and Africa) at the data center services specialist. (See Virgin Gives Birth to Cloud Strategy.)

Talking to Light Reading at the Cloud Expo Europe event in London, Cresswell said Savvis is "seeing plenty of traction through the Virgin Media Business relationship and [has] signed up new customers, which is encouraging. It's our first foray into seeing if enterprise customers can access our services through a partner and set themselves up without any interaction from [Savvis]."



Cresswell added: "We now have some [enterprise] customers who we have never met, which is a bit strange but that's also good. ... Virgin is managing the relationship. It's a new model and probably one of the first of its kind in the world."

Unsurprisingly, Virgin Media Business is equally as positive about the relationship and resulting Virtual Private Data Centre offering. "By integrating Savvis’ product with our high-speed, secure, fibre-optic network we have been able to offer more choice in connectivity and service options that have already grabbed the interest of many of our customers," noted Andy Perrin, senior product manager, cloud services, at Virgin Media Business in an email to Light Reading.

Exactly how well the partnership is developing, though, is unclear. "It's hard to measure how successful it has been because we don't have anything to measure it against," stated the Savvis man.

So are there any other such relationships in the pipeline? Cresswell noted that, outside its domestic U.S. market where it is now part of the CenturyLink Inc. (NYSE: CTL) empire, Savvis also has a relationship in India with Bharti Airtel Ltd. (Mumbai: BHARTIARTL). (See Savvis, Bharti Cloud Up India and CenturyLink Clouds Up With Savvis Buy.)

It'll be interesting to track the success of this partnership in the coming years as communications service providers (CSPs) decide whether to team up with a company such as Savvis, which is already dealing with the complexity of creating, managing and delivering cloud services, or build out their own cloud service enablement platform.

Clearly the market is likely to be a mix of both, but which model will ultimately dominate?

Check out our Carrier Cloud Services page, and the articles below, for more on this topic:

— Ray Le Maistre, International Managing Editor, Light Reading