Credit Crunch Drives CIOs Towards Hosted Services, Industry and Analysts Say

Published 13th February 2009

Data Centre Sees Six-Fold Sales Increase in Just Six Months

Gosport, Hampshire, 11 February, 2009: The economic crisis is driving IT managers and chief information officers (CIOs) to turn to data centres as a way to save costs and improve overall operational efficiency. This is according to Hampshire-based data centre and IT services provider Redstation, which has seen a 600 per cent increase in sales in the last six months alone, and industry analysts agree.

Redstation’s Technical Director, Peter Appleton, said that companies were looking to hosted services to reduce their IT budgets, ensure business continuity and avoid further investments in new equipment, such as servers, software, and networking systems and services.

“Data centres provide an ideal service for IT decision makers in the current economic climate,” said Appleton. “CIOs always want reliability, security, scalability and value for money from IT, but in the current climate getting this balance right can mean the difference between business success and failure. This is why we’re seeing a sharp rise in interest in our services.”

The majority of Redstation’s custom concerns business-critical applications and off-site back-up from companies in the south of England, as IT managers like to stay close to their servers in a colocation environment, Appleton explained.

Clive Longbottom of analyst group Quocirca said organisations would need to chase flexibility through 2009/10, as maintaining old process models would be unlikely to see them through the current economic climate. Business continuity and flexibility are key, and investments in the data centre will be needed to provide this.

"We’ve already seen that IT purchasers are looking to cut spending over the current economic cycle, but they also need to ensure their company remains competitive,” he said. “Existing data centres can be constraining, and I expect we’ll see an increased migration towards advanced data centre models during 2009.”

Redstation’s Appleton concluded that the data centre industry would emerge in good shape from the current economic crisis but warned that organisations should look at the data centre option sooner rather than later.

“If every data centre sees similar growth to what we’ve been seeing capacity could be stretched by the end of the year across the country. We at Redstation are in a prime position to service our customer base but IT managers in many areas may find it difficult to find suitable colocation facilities,” he concluded.

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About Redstation

Redstation Limited was founded in 1998 as a domain registration and web hosting company. In 2004 the company added dedicated servers to its product range and in 2006 opened its first purpose-built data centre in Hampshire representing an investment of more than £2 million.

Today the company provides web hosting, dedicated servers and colocation to thousands of customers around the world - including the British Government, international corporations, banks and SMEs.

For more visit www.redstation.com
For press enquiries email press@redstation.com