I had the pleasure of meeting with William Toll, Sr. Director of Marketing - Strategic Alliances at NaviSite to discuss the channel in general.  How it's evolving, how channel partners' needs are changing, and how the cloud is effecting both.  Learning more about NaviSite I realized that they were cloud before the cloud was cool.

NaviSite provides a full suite of reliable and scalable managed services, including application services, industry leading enterprise hosting, and managed cloud services for enterprises looking to outsource IT infrastructures.  With some pretty impressive alliances to boast, NaviSite is truly catering to their customer and prospect base.  The thing I was most impressed with?  Their data center.

Part II of our meeting was a tour of their data center.  I know what you're thinking, you've seen one, you've seen them all right?  Wrong!  I worked at several storage companies and have probably seen more data centers then most people out there.  Simply put, this data center was amazing, the back-ups for the back-ups, for back-ups; the state-of-the-art cooling system; and the entire room full of batteries were mind boggling.  They have never, you hear me NEVER in 10 years lost power to the raised floor which they attribute to maintaining their equipment and replacing parts not when they are advised to but before they are advised to.  I met Cliff Migneault the Data Center Manager.  There isn't anything this guy and his team don't know about their equipment.  I'm tempted to think he sleeps in the back room and talks to the equipment when no one is looking.

Overall my take-away from my time with NaviSite is they are truly proud of what they built and enjoy sharing it with their customers, their partners, and their employees.  Ah, what we could accomplish if more companies felt that way.