Savvis is building out its services to meet growing demand for managed services among capital markets firms.

Savvis, which will become CenturyLink Technology Solutions on January 21, 2014, is investing in infrastructure and expanding its footprint to help firms deal with rapid regulatory change and information security.

“We are the fifth largest Internet and telecommunications company in the world,” said Roji Oommen, senior director of financial services at Savvis. “We are investing hundreds of millions of dollars to build out data center capacity. We have made acquisitions this year, like Appfog and Tier 3, to broaden our portfolio set.”

Oommen continued, “We are expanding our footprint and improving our capabilities in very exciting emerging areas, like our recent announcement about our Big Data infrastructure. All of these reflect our ability to expand our services beyond commoditized baseline infrastructure and to help customers solve large business challenges.

Savvis has launched Big Data Solutions, a suite of managed hardware and software services for optimizing data storage, integration, retrieval and analysis.

The first set of services is called Savvis Big Data Foundation Services – a suite of standardized, fully hosted and managed services designed to help organizations glean the most value possible from all their data. The suite includes Savvis’ managed services for Cloudera and MapR platforms based on Hadoop.

Regulations are driving firms to seek to reduce their operating expenses and to remain nimble.

The environment that results from regulatory and rule changes over the past couple of years will be very interesting. Our belief, which is shared by our customers, is that regulations are changing the economic structure of the market, which is driving a tremendous amount of activity,” Oommen said. “We think the net result of this well be a huge financial incentive for firms to outsource noncore capabilities, driven by cost savings and the need for agility, because the way these regulations will play out is unpredictable. Firms are looking to maximize their agility and lower their underlying cost base. That will result in larger outsourcing deals.”

Noted Tony Kroell, vice president of product marketing at Savvis: “The regulatory environment will continue to drive decision making. We have seen surveys which show that financial services firms are allocating significant proportions of their budget to comply with regulatory change, in the capital markets space as well as banking.”

As for information security, banks see mounting threats of cyberattacks, and regulators are taking notice.

“As firms move to more dynamic infrastructure and application portfolios to take advantage of things like cloud, information security is a big deal,” said Oommen. “Banks are logical targets for cyberattacks. As organized crime activity picks up, there’s a huge focus on improving the infosec profile. And there’s a lot of regulatory attention on this as well. This has been a huge story for 2013, and will be an even bigger story for 2014 and 2015 as well.”

Added Kroell: “We are seeing a number of new clients that have come from other providers that have stated that working with a partner with breadth and scale not only in infrastructure, but in solution sets, particularly with our robust managed security portfolio, is an added bonus, knowing they are in an environment where they can leverage those capabilities from a provider that’s got experience in that space.”