SAVVIS’ VIRTUAL REALITY HAS REAL IMPACT ON GLOBAL COMMERCE AND LOCAL ECONOMY
By Bill Beggs Jr.
Rob McCormick swivels in his office chair, pulls two bottled waters from a small fridge and hands one across his desk to a visitor. There’s nothing ostentatious about him or his office, but there is an energy you can feel in this CEO and in his company SAVVIS, headquartered in Town and Country.
Left to right: Jim Mori, Managing Director Americas; Vince DiMemmo, Senior Vice President Global Product Management and Marketing; Peggy Hohl, Senior Vice President Global Human Resources;
Rob McCormick, Chairman and
CEO; Bryan Doerr, Chief Technology Officer and Jeff Von Deylen, Chief Financial Officer. |
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Unlike most CEOs, McCormick doesn’t have a corner office. He sits in a converted storage area that now has floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking two stories of flat screen displays and rows of computer monitors that make up SAVVIS’ St. Louis Global Operations Center (one of three, the others are in the UK and Singapore). The Center looks a little like a NASA control room, but something’s strange…where are all the people?
“We’ve developed smart software that automates most of the tasks required to build, run, and maintain an enterprise data center,” McCormick says. “Other IT shops use armies of operators to run their servers, storage devices and networks. We use automation tools. And the best part is we offer better
reliability and security, and the price is lower.”
So if SAVVIS is so great, how come we haven’t heard of them? Most of us have seen the SAVVIS logo on what used to be the Kiel, but what are they all about?
 Welcome to SAVVIS. |
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“We are definitely an innovator in the information technology industry,” says McCormick. “We compete every day against IBM, ATT, and EDS, and we’re winning. But we don’t spend
a lot of money on traditional advertising. We focus on our 5,000+ enterprise clients. The strategy is working–we’ve grown from a start-up to over $600 million in revenue in the last six years.”
SAVVIS is leading the evolution to the next generation of computing. It all started 40 years ago or so with the mainframe computer–
a world that was reliable and secure, but somewhat limited in function. In the 1980s personal computers changed everything, bringing to life advanced graphics and powerful personal productivity applications like spreadsheets, word processors and email. The problem was that as computing grew, it got more complicated, less reliable, and less secure. The next generation of computing, according to SAVVIS, is not about hardware… it’s about services.
“We have figured out a way to deliver hardware as a service,” says McCormick. “We have 24 data centers around the world that provide the server cycles and storage capacity to run the most demanding business applications. And then we deliver those applications to users in 47 countries, using our global network.”
The SAVVIS help desk supports over 5,000
business clients around the world. |
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With SAVVIS, businesses can stop paying up front for hardware that never gets fully used and start paying only for the services they need, when they need it. Is this new approach difficult for businesses to adopt? Sometimes, because people still like to buy “things.”
“It’s definitely a paradigm shift,” says McCormick. “The good news for our customers is that we can provide all the traditional IT services like our competitors, but we are the only company that can offer a migration path to this new breed of IT utility services, and
literally you save 50 percent over night. Companies are going to want to buy IT the way they buy electricity.”
McCormick pauses for a moment, looks at the BlackBerry phone on his desk, and smiles. His wife, Michelle, is on the line. McCormick takes a minute to help her transfer music
into the library on the home computer, they exchange terms of endearment, and he’s back to business. Later in the interview, McCormick takes another call from Michelle, perhaps
with a technical question or something to do with one of their daughters: Jacqueline, 8, Alexandra, 6, and Gwendolyn, 3.
McCormick, 39 or 40 (depending on when you’re reading this; his birthday is Sept. 28),
is a “guy’s guy” who played rugby, skied competitively in college and still plays hockey. What’s it like to be the only male in the house? He grins broadly and says Michelle often reminds him “you’re not CEO of this house, pal.” His mom tells him the uneven odds are karma—God’s paying him back.
McCormick’s office buzzes with activity and it’s clear that his roots and the company’s run deep in St Louis. So even before I can deliver the standard St. Louis “what high school” greeting, McCormick offers, “Clayton High School.” While we’re talking, Jim Mori, who was born and raised in St. Louis and now runs SAVVIS’ Americas Region, stops in to talk about how sales from his 200-person sales force are growing at an even faster clip. McCormick has known Mori for 16 years. Then Peggy Hohl, global Human Resources chief and a former collegiate national champion volleyball player from
St. Louis, joins the conversation with an update on SAVVIS’ hiring plans around the world. Finally, Max Mutrux, SAVVIS’ chief scientist who grew up across town in University City, enters the room to brainstorm some new
software he’s developing. According to McCormick, he’s been collaborating with Mutrux for decades. Together they wrote
the core software that today drives the
IT systems used by industry giants like Microsoft and Universal Music, many of
the world’s top financial institutions, restaurant chains like Panera Bread, and
thousands of smaller firms that are opening new markets.
Since January, SAVVIS has provided
managed network services to Panera Bread, headquartered in Richmond Heights. Panera was created from the combination of Au Bon Pain and St. Louis Bread Company. Today, Panera operates 750 bakery-cafes in 35 states. Panera uses SAVVIS to support high-speed broadband wireless Internet access (Wi-Fi) at more than 600 locations, making Panera Bread the largest provider of free Wi-Fi Internet access in the United States. The
Wi-Fi services allows customers with a Wi-Fi-enabled laptop or PDA to access the Internet, check e-mail, connect to a corporate server or browse the web.
| SAVVIS monitors 24 data centers in the U.S., U.K., and Japan. |
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Seems that Starbucks isn’t the only game in town—or out, anymore. And Panera is not alone, more than 400 retailers use SAVVIS including: Ann Taylor, Gucci, Mont Blanc, Jos. A. Bank Clothiers, Virgin Megastores, and The Sharper Image, to name a few.
The SAVVIS momentum is building in
other in other industries too, though it has taken St. Louis companies a while to wake
up and smell the bandwidth. Bryan Cave signed up with SAVVIS as did the biggest
law firms in New York, Chicago, and Washington DC. SAVVIS now has 30 of 50 largest international law firms as clients.
A few paragraphs back, when McCormick was sidetracked by family business, he was describing how the service-oriented approach to IT was nothing short of revolutionary. Competition for SAVVIS’ business hasn’t become an issue...yet.
“I don’t know who the other guys are going to be,” says McCormick. “You’re about to see another shift.”
An understatement, to say the least.
Prognosticator and author Alvin Toffler, in warning of paradigm shift after paradigm shift, has said: “The illiterate of the 21st
century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.”
SAVVIS has experienced its share of rough seas since the beginning, but its unique ability to deliver innovative IT services has enabled the company to survive the .com bust and thrive in its aftermath. McCormick credits intuition, teamwork, fearlessness, and no small measure of luck.
Five years ago in February, SAVVIS went public. It proved to be “the last great IPO before the tech bubble burst.” After SAVVIS, Silicon Valley and Death Valley suddenly became synonymous.
“It was literally the day before the market went south,” McCormick recalls. Many of the companies that fueled the Internet boom went out of business,
taking their suppliers with them. But SAVVIS stayed afloat. “We always believed it would work. We never stopped growing, and we won awards for our
customer service.”
When you drive down Highway 40, you’ll see SAVVIS in a striking building that once belonged to two different .com casualties–Brooks Fiber and WorldCom. Out of a total of 2,000 employees around the world, SAVVIS currently has over 600 employees in its St Louis
headquarters. The local talent pool has
fueled SAVVIS’ growth and the St. Louis
community has helped attract many
senior executives to SAVVIS. For example, SAVVIS’ CFO, Jeff Von Deylen, and Vince DiMemmo, the Global Product and Marketing executive, both are recent transplants to St. Louis and converts to The Gateway City.
| SAVVIS Global Operations Center can
identify and fix problems before they occur. |
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While there is indeed a palpable energy at SAVVIS, it’s an energy fueled by experience and wisdom. This is no .com baby. It’s a mature organization delivering superior service to companies that bet their business every day on SAVVIS’ ability to build and manage their IT systems. |
