Thursday Bytes: Zayo, Southern Telecom, Earthlink, ShoreTel, QTS

Time for a quick roundup of news from the metro and federal fronts.  Oops, it’s Thursday, not Wednesday!

Zayo had a bit of good news on the Federal front with the awarding of a Schedule 70 IT contract by the GSA. As with most news in the federal sector, this contract just means that now they can pursue actual contracts, offering bandwidth infrastructure to the various government agencies that use this particular vehicle. And Zayo also won an expanded relationship with Ark Data Centers over in the UK. Zayo will be connecting Ark’s Cody Park data center in the south of England. Geo had previously built fiber into Ark’s Spring Park facility in Corsham, Wiltshire.

Southern Telecom is investing in dark fiber buildouts in two of its main markets in the southeast. They’re adding 43 route miles of fiber in Atlanta, bringing their total to 128 miles hooking up some 40 buildings. And just to the west they’re adding 127 route miles of fiber in Birmingham, Alabama, as well as hooking up 42 on-net buildings. Along with the usual growing demand for metro dark fiber reach, Southern’s energy utility parent has been working on smart grid initiatives in the same markets and these fiber builds are partly tied to those efforts as well.

Earthlink picked up a managed services deal in the retail vertical. Hancock Fabrics has picked them to simplify its infrastructure across its 262 store footprint spanning 37 states. That includes its hosted voice and PBX, firewall, and secure WiFi among other managed network services. Hancock says it expects the upgrade to also save 20% over its previous plan.

ShoreTel won a unified communications deal with the Buffalo Bills. The NFL team has installed its contact center and mobility solutions at its recently remodeled stadium. It’s not just in the backoffice either, they’re also using it to provision phones for use on the field on game day, and all at lower costs and reduced power consumption. ShoreTel’s channel partner PremCom facilitated the deployment.

And Zayo wasn’t the only one with news on the federal front. QTS has achieved FedRAMP compliance for its federal cloud solutions. Veris performed the assessment, under which QTS became the first cloud provider to gain compliance through the CSP Supply Path. QTS’s federal cloud IaaS platform is operated out of its Richmond and Atlanta data centers.

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Categories: Cloud Computing · Datacenter · Federal contracts · Metro fiber · Unified Communications