Cervalis: Shelter From The Storm

Even the best-laid business plans can be trounced by Mother Nature, and that's why HomeSource Capital Mortgage isn't taking any chances with the location of its hosted applications.

The home financing company provides mortgage services throughout 25 states from headquarters in Jupiter, Fla., part of the hurricane belt that has been struck by devastating storms such as Hurricane Floyd.

Cervalis President Michael Boccardi says customer service is key.

When Larry Lewis joined HomeSource last year as president and CEO, he began the search for a hosting provider to outsource the operations of its fledgling in-house data center, which was ready for expansion.

Looking to save on the cost of building up HomeSource's infrastructure, Lewis also wanted to move its systems to a geographic region not commonly plagued by natural disasters and the inevitable service interruptions that come with them.

"The company did not have an appropriate plan as it relates to growth, expansion and disaster recovery," says Lewis.

While HomeSource has yet to be hit by a hurricane, Lewis doesn't want to tempt fate. He remembers the "very expensive and painful process" under-taken at a former company to deploy 60 employees to a second location during Hurricane Floyd.

"Only about 40 employees got out before the airport closed," he says.

That's why HomeSource turned to Cervalis, a hosting provider based in Stamford, Conn., that targets small and midsize customers with managed hosting services.

"Our forte is the management of IT operations much like it would have been if it were in our customer's own data center," says Michael Boccardi, president of Cervalis.

Cervalis provides co-location hosting as well as a menu of about 50 managed services from data centers in Stamford and Wappingers Falls, N.Y., says Boccardi. Its managed service offerings include backup, database administration, operating system maintenance, network management and security, all of which Cervalis currently provides to HomeSource, he says.

The hosting provider also offers contingency planning, he says. Cervalis hosts HomeSource's accounting and CRM applications on five Compaq Wintel and Sun Unix servers at a New York facility Cervalis also helped HomeSource build a disaster recovery facility housed by a HomeSource business partner in Michigan that connects back to Cervalis' data center.

"With eight hours notice, we can turn the business off here and turn it on 1,200 miles away," says Lewis.

The mortgage company spends about $20,000 per month for equipment and Cervalis' services, a savings Lewis estimates at about 60 percent to 65 percent of what it would have cost HomeSource to build the same service and infrastructure capabilities.

Through his evaluation of about a half-dozen service providers, Lewis says he was impressed by Cervalis' flexibility and communication with customers.

"We felt Cervalis was next-generation," says Lewis. "Some of the other service providers appeared to be a little bureaucratic and old."

When HomeSource recommended changes to Cervalis' processes to better suit its existing environment, the hosting provider was willing to modify them, Lewis says.

HomeSource frequently communicates with the hosting provider through periodic conference calls and monthly visits to the New York facility, Lewis says.

Cervalis prides itself on customer service, eschewing the hands-off approach taken by some competitors in favor of hands-on managed services, says Boccardi.

"With some hosting companies, if the customer has a problem with its site or its operations, the hosting company says, 'It's not a problem in our data center. You'll have to talk to your application folks,' and the customer gets the runaround," Boccardi says.

It's a strategy that's paying off for Cervalis as HomeSource plans to expand operations in the near future.

"Within a short period of time, we will need a facility on the West Coast, so we would put a phone switch out there and open the pipeline to Cervalis."