Paetec expands cloud portfolio

Communications service provider Paetec is expanding its nationwide footprint of data centers from seven to 20 by then end of next year, and has substantially broadened its line of cloud-based offerings for enterprises.

Paetec has focused on business customers since its inception so brings strong relationships with businesses in the regions it serves to its newly expanded cloud focus.

Paetec CEO Arunas Chesonis told Connected Planet that the company’s differentiator is in having an embedded base of supporting infrastructure, as well as bundled pricing and support.

We focus on the medium to large enterprise—and the medium enterprise is our sweet spot. We don’t need two million square feet to serve them. We’ll get up to 300,000 to 350,000 square feet … We do a lot of desktop services. With a recent acquisition, we can do a lot of WAN support for people as well as WAN services, the cloud and the network. If you’re outsourcing, we can handle the LAN and the WAN.

Among the new cloud-based offerings Paetec is rolling out are a virtual server solution that lets enterprises buy computing and associated storage on a per-logical server basis for a monthly fee; a dedicated server product that designed to let customers make the transition to virtualization and cloud computing at their own pace, without the burden of new infrastructure deployment or specialized design to support virtualization; a managed storage option that offers a multi-tenant storage platform with the ability to purchase storage on demand as required; and hosted Exchange for email.

Paetec currently has data centers in Andover, Mass.; Bethlehem and Conshohocken, Pa.; Richmond, Va.; Milwaukee; Houston; and Phoenix, Ariz. By the end of this year, the company plans to have expanded to McLean, Va.; Tampa, Fla.; Columbus, Ohio; Detroit; and Charlotte, N.C. By the end of 2012, plans call for additional data centers in Dallas; Chicago; Northern California; Rochester, N.Y.; Pittsburgh; Denver; Atlanta; and a location in the Pacific Northwest.