Wednesday Roundup 9/22: Internap, 360Networks, Global Crossing

Several interesting items in the past 24 hours or so worth a comment:

Rhapsody has moved its data center into the new space that Internap Network Services (NASDAQ:INAP, news, filings) recently built out up in Seattle.  Rhapsody offers digital music subscriptions, with some 10 million music tracks.  This sort of bandwidth-heavy specialty site is a natural for Internap’s high performance niche, so the decision to move to Internap’s newly built out space seems natural.  Internap itself, however, has continued to tread water in terms of revenue growth thus far in 2010.  Is the turnaround near? 

360Networks picked up a nextgen VoIP customer for its wholesale origination and termination products.  Panterra specializes in cloud-based unified communications, and will use 360Network’s unique VoIP footprint west of the Mississippi to increase its reach and lower its costs.  I’m not entirely sure just what stage cloud-based unified communications is at, but I have a feeling we’ll be hearing that keyword-rich buzzphrase quite a bit over the next year or two. 

Global Crossing has upgraded its uCommand customer portal.  Among the new features are real-time performance monitoring, the ability to interact with a complete customer inventory, management of network alarms, and a “customized graphical map interface with circuit-by-circuit location-specific granularity”.  It’s all part of the the evolving philosophy at Global Crossing for customer relations, encapsulated in their Seven Touch Points of Customer Excellence pictured to the left.  As an engineer, it’s all MBA-speak to me, but then nobody would ever put me in charge of customer support either.  Global Crossing also added some new talent to the leadership of their collaboration services team, bringing in Warren Baxley to head the company’s Global Collaboration and Unified Communications product line.  That should be an interesting segment to watch at the company, given its focus on larger corporations that are likely to move on UC in the next coupld of years.

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Categories: Datacenter · Internet Backbones · VoIP