SAVVIS to Host Entellium CRM Suite

Entellium, a maker of customer relationship management (CRM) software is expected to announce a wide-ranging alliance with data center operator SAVVIS, according to CNN/Money. The deal, which will see SAVVIS hosting Entellium's entire software suite, "shows how a relatively small software company can quickly jump into the same game as some of the biggest names in the tech world," according to the article. SAVVIS operates 25 data centers around the world.

Entellium competes with Salesforce.com, and is another example of data center demand from software as a service (SaaS). The company says its customers are primarily small to medium-size companies, and pay as little as $50 a month for the app. An excerpt from the story:

Paul Johnston, CEO of Entellium, noted the demands of hosting SaaS solutions.

"There are very few companies that need to design a system that might have more than 100,000 people doing active transactions," says Johnston. "It is only the software-as-a-service vendors and the Googles of the world that have that kind of technical challenge."

"No one is going to want to give you their data if you don't put it across a world-class network, but software startups don't have the money to put in that kind of infrastructure," says Jonathan Crane, president of SAVVIS, speaking of the challenge companies such as Entellium might have faced a few years ago. "We offer a utility platform that gives the customer the flexibility it needs without having the upfront cost of putting the infrastructure together."