AT&T* today announced that it has been named the ‘Top Provider’ in the Nemertes Research 2010 PilotHouse Award for Data-Center Colocation. This is the second year that AT&T has topped the colocation rankings compiled by Nemertes, a research-advisory firm that specializes in analyzing and quantifying the business value of emerging technologies. In the same benchmark research, AT&T was also named as a strong performer in the Cloud Computing and Security as a Service spaces.
For the colocation award, in interviews and web-based research Nemertes conducted with key IT decision-makers, AT&T scored highest in all three categories of the report – technology, customer service and value – thanks to its large colocation footprint, strong security credentials and experience, and the attractiveness of its overall offer, which bundles networking and hosting solutions into one package. In the Cloud Computing benchmarking, AT&T scored particularly well in customer service; and for its technology and value offering in the Security as a Service space.
“The goal of the PilotHouse awards program is to ascertain how well vendors and service providers perform in the eyes of their business users,” said author of the report, Ted Ritter, Senior Research Analyst, Nemertes Research.
Data-center colocation involves the provision of data-center space on third-party premises, allowing companies to take advantage of enhanced IT infrastructure without needing to build and maintain a large dedicated data-center in-house. With its 38 Internet Data Centers (IDCs), including five “supercenters”, AT&T’s data-center colocation offering covers five continents. The AT&T global backbone network carries about 18 petabytes of data traffic on an average business day — the equivalent of more than 2.6 megabytes of data each business day for every man, woman and child on the planet — to nearly every continent and country, with up to 99.999 percent reliability. AT&T's global IDCs are optimized to provide an industry-leading web, data, and e-business applications hosting environment. Each IDC is protected from intrusion and failure by multi-layered security, redundancy, and rapid response recovery.
Nemertes issues awards based on enterprise user ratings of their vendors or service providers. In order to do this, Nemertes conducted web-based research and benchmark interviews with over 2,000 IT decision-makers from primarily U.S. companies, many of which are global multinationals. The research, conducted between January and May 2010, asked participants to rate their data-center colocation providers in the areas of value, customer service, and technology.
