The IT Nerd

PEER 1 Hosting is making news again. This time they’ve announced the launch of a program to increase its portfolio of strategic alliance partners. Here’s the value proposition from Mike Mayer, Global Channel Director for PEER 1 Hosting:

“The relationships PEER 1 Hosting has formed with partners such as Tier 3 and Magento are delivering significant competitive advantage to end users,” said Mike Mayer, Global Channel Director, PEER 1 Hosting. “Leading edge platforms deserve and demand optimised hosting environments. End users have the peace of mind of knowing that with our Strategic Alliance Partners, the technology and service we provide is completely compatible to deliver the best performance.”

You can check out the program here.

I also found out today how much of a player PEER 1 is when it comes to their infrastructure. They have 19 data centres and 21 Points of Presence across North America and EMEA. They also have their own high performance 10Gbps FastFiber Network, which spans 25k miles and connects its data centres, enabling it to offer a 99.999% uptime guarantee.

Now that’s serious!

It seems that success follows success for PEER 1 Hosting. Yesterday, they were named a Platinum Partner by Magento, a leading eCommerce platform provider.

What does that mean you ask?

If you’ve got an e-commerce site of some sort, you can’t afford to have slow loading pages as that leads to abandoned shopping carts which in turn leads to lost revenue. That’s where this partnership comes in. Magento Optimized Managed Hosting is a turnkey solution that delivers an infrastructure honed to meet Magento’s intense requirements. The end result is a fast, rock-solid Magento site that performs exceptionally, delivering that fast user experience online shoppers expect. An example of a PEER 1 customer who has had success using this solution is Boodles who is Britain’s leading retailer of fine, bespoke diamond jewellery.

You have to be impressed with a company like PEER 1 who continues to put up these sorts of wins.

PEER1 Hosting who I’ve written about frequently as they’re a great success story. I got news today that they have formed an alliance with Tier 3 to ability to easily and successfully manage their businesses in the cloud.:

The solution combines hosting services from PEER 1 Hosting with the enterprise-grade cloud platform from Tier 3, and is underpinned by VMware’s vCloud platform; giving customers the ability to easily and successfully manage their businesses in the cloud.
 
Built with IT and development operations in mind, the enterprise cloud platform drives tangible return on investment, reduces time to market, makes it easier to manage complexity and minimises operational requirements. Customers will also benefit from local data centres and regionalised disaster recovery along with an expanding global footprint of cloud nodes.

Seeing as business is being done in the cloud these days, it helps to bring a solution like this to the table. This is something that businesses who are serious of cloud computing can’t ignore. If you’re considering cloud computing, you need to look into this today.

It must be good to be PEER 1 at the moment. Why? First, Cloud Spectator recently published the results of an internal network performance benchmark, comparing PEER 1 Hosting’s Zunicore cloud solution next to Amazon’s EC2 Cloud Platform. The performance of each provider’s internal network was tested on a virtual private network (VPN) and measured both speed and consistency. The results determined Zunicore as the better and more consistent performer. It outperformed Amazon in every one of the CloudSpecs performance measurements, including CPU performance and network performance. You can read the complete report here.

Next PEER 1 has again been named a Champion in Info-Tech Research Group’s Canadian Colocation/Managed Services Vendor Landscape. The recognition comes as a result of PEER 1’s excellent customer engagement, flexible contracts, and affordable pricing. This achievement further demonstrates PEER 1 Hosting’s commitment to providing only the best in IT infrastructure service:

“The Canadian market for managed services and colocation have continued to broaden bringing new options for enterprises,” said Darin Stahl, Lead Research Analyst, Info-Tech Research Group. “Our research indicates that enterprises are achieving the best outcomes by being able to mix and match the veracious service delivery models in a hybrid fashion to meet the business needs.  Accordingly Info-Tech advises enterprises to seek out those providers than can offer a continuum of services including co-location, managed services, and IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service).

Clearly, this shows that PEER 1 at the front of the pack when it comes to hosting. I said it before and I’ll say it again. Keep an eye on these guys. They’re going places.

I’ve written about PEER 1 on several occasions as they’re one of those companies that is a must watch as far as I am concerned. I got an e-mail from them earlier this week with some interesting news. PEER 1 has successfully completed two independent audits, SSAE 16 Type II and CSAE 3416. In doing so, PEER 1 Hosting continues to demonstrate their commitment to providing their customers with peace of mind and transparency, and ensuring the ongoing security of their data and information. That’s important because if you have an e-commerce application or simply have your corporate data hosted outside your company, then you have to put PEER 1 at the top of the list for hosting providers because not all hosting providers go through this much effort to show that they are this secure.

That’s another reason to keep an eye on PEER 1. Clearly they’re doing the right things to put themselves in the position of being the hosting provider for businesses.

Being Canadian I like to write about Canadian companies that are succeeding in the marketplace. Case in point is Peer 1 who are a hosting company out of Vancouver that I’ve written about on several occasions. They announced recently that they have had a record year, and is poised for continued growth as a key player in the international web hosting market. From the press release:

“We have seen significant growth in North America and overseas in the past twelve months,” said Fabio Banducci, President and CEO, PEER 1 Hosting. “That success couldn’t have been achieved without our people. Our people and their tireless dedication to superior customer service is the reason why companies around the globe are turning to PEER 1 to realize the potential of the internet.”

Now you can read the press release for all the details of all the things they did in the last twelve months (and all of them are very significant), but I’ll say this. Anytime a Canadian company can succeed at home and overseas, that’s a good thing. Success stories like Peer 1 should be applauded. I look forward to seeing more from them in the near future.

PEER 1 has made a lot of news lately. Now there’s a new piece of news crossing the wire today. PEER 1 has tapped Cameleon Software to improve the efficiency of its sales processes worldwide:

As an industry leader, PEER 1 constantly looks for ways to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of its sales processes. With Cameleon Software’s CPQ solution, PEER 1 will not only reduce the time-to-market for building and launching new offerings on an international scale, but also enables its sales reps to optimize the configuration process and generate accurate quotes and proposals faster.
 
Jay Newman, Senior Vice President of Sales at PEER 1 explained: “Our sales reps in North America and in Europe are using Salesforce CRM on a daily basis, so when looking for a CPQ solution, a tight and seamless integration with this CRM was one of our top requirements.
 
Another key element of our decision was the ability of the solution to handle hundreds of offers combined with multiple currencies and pricing structures,” he continued. “We evaluated several vendors and Cameleon clearly provides the best customer experience. We are now looking forward to deploying the software and making the lives of both our product marketing and sales teams easier. We expect a significant decrease in the overall time to produce new offers and new quotes and thus, expect increased sales.”

If a sales teams have the proper tools to get the job done, then the sky is the limit. The choice of Cameleon CPQ (Configure, Price, Quote) is definitely one tool that will enable PEER 1 to grab more market share. I expect this to make PEER 1 even more of a bigger player in the hosting industry.