VB will run an integrated IP network solution for AMF that includes over 300 bowling centers in 38 states, [...]]]>

Racking up its latest win, Verizon Business has announced AMF Bowling Centers as its latest IT win.  It’s part of a bigger march that must be giving heartburn to system integrators such as IBM, HP, and EDS.

VB will run an integrated IP network solution for AMF that includes over 300 bowling centers in 38 states, including VoIP,  point of sale and credit card transactions, web hosting, video streaming, an on-demand hosted solution for music (think one big jukebox for customers).  Later on, a video surveillance system and a centralized energy management system will be deployed.

New IT wins Verizon has announced over the last three months include JetBlue, Nissan North America,  and Virgin Blue Group.  The company is also making a big push into the the health care IT arena, so it’ll start racking up a bunch of wins in that sector down the road.

CaaS is being sharply aimed at business and government customers who want on-demand and surge computing resources.  It is available [...]]]>

Verizon Business has rolled out its “cloud-based” Computing as a Service (CaaS, not to be confused with SaaS) solution today.   Targeted to large enterprise customers, it isn’t likely to make a lot of waves at Amazon.

CaaS is being sharply aimed at business and government customers who want on-demand and surge computing resources.  It is available immediately (Yes, really, today) in the U.S. and Europe and will be rolled out to the Asia-Pacific region in August.   You can run the service either over Verizon’s public IP network or its MPLS-based private IP network or even run the service over anyone else’s IP connection, but you can guess what Verizon would prefer.

Part of the pitch for CaaS is a migration of the IT/data center from a simple “overhead” expense to more of a service-based organization complete with chargebacks to individual departments or business units.

Security gets heavy emphasis with both proactive security management and physical security audits and CaaS-specific security features, including virtual firewalls, an audit-trail for all changes, and secure connections to customer-provisioned resources (MPLS, MPLS). Customers can also spring for an optional add-on security services including various security assessment tools, host intrusion detection, and identity and access management.

The other part of the “secret sauce” to Verizon CaaS is an internally developed workflow and automated resource engine for customers to manage computing resources for provisioning of both physical and virtual server environments.

About the only surprise out of Verizon’s briefing was no mention of using cloud computing as a disaster recovery mechanism.  A spokesperson for Verizon said they planned to address that application down the road.

List price cost for the service is $525 for setup and $250/month for subscription, plus usage charges for resources. Again, this service isn’t being marketed like Amazon’s cloud (“Show up with a credit card and go”),  so $250/month is noise in the budget of a major corporation or government agency (Not to mention that businesses doing volume with Verizon are going to haggle on price — or should be).