Nortel/Microsoft team to cut corporate crash & burn

ATLANTA--If a corporation's data center goes down due to human error or natural disaster, it can cripple the business. That's why it will spend millions of dollars on redundant power, networking and physical infrastructure.

In an effort to take the pressure off of enterprises, Nortel and Microsoft have teamed to offer a managed services solution that provides full redundancy and service level agreements (SLAs) to data center operations. Company officials insist the full services and SLA angles differentiate this managed services proposal. The endeavor is called continuously available managed services (CAMS).

Continuous availability is a new standard for delivering hosted applications services. It goes beyond high availability to address service reliability, backup and recovery by "virtualizing resources across distance" or duplicating the resources in another location.

For example, if a California-based financial services company needs security and backup for mission-critical data, it backs up its own data center with a duplicate in another location. At the heart of the Nortel/Microsoft agreement is the ability of the effort to provide that total services backup.

According to Pieter Knook, Microsoft VP of the network service providers group, the ultimate objective is to drive profitability for both the enterprise and the service provider. For the enterprises, they don't have to build and support the infrastructure themselves. For the service provider, it allows them to move beyond simply providing connectivity, which is a market of diminishing returns. By adding applications and support, the service provider increases its revenue opportunity.

Anil Khatod, Nortel Networks chief marketing and strategy officer, said that the number one obstacle to the ASP model in this sector is the lack of service reliability. According to the two companies, their agreement will provide absolute availability.

The CAMS solution supports Microsoft Exchange Server 2000, Commerce Server 2000, Biztalk Server and SQL Server 2000 as managed services, and Nortel's OPTera, Alteon and Passport products.
Rhonda L. Wickham is Wireless Review Editor-in-Chief. She can be reached at rhonda_wickham@intertec.com.