CMPi has signed a 1.5 million pound, five year deal with SAVVIS to enable more effective use of existing IT resources and to support international business growth.

The deal with SAVVIS, a global leader in IT infrastructure services for business and government applications, will ensure reliability, scalability and redundancy of CMPi's infrastructure and enable CMPi to channel its IT resources into more strategic IT projects to support business growth. Mission critical projects include expanding its virtual conference and exhibition offering, as well as developing its digital strategy to deliver added value to its customers.

CMPi publishes over 40 magazines including Music Week and Property Week and provides award winning targeted media solutions such as exhibitions, conferences and websites. The company has customers in over 120 countries, across 20 vertical markets and is expanding its offerings on a global scale.

Paul Way, Digital Development Director at CMPi noted, ''For CMPi, IT is critical in supporting business growth, particularly as more of our business activity is focused online. We also have a busy publishing and print workflow operation across countless editorial, online, creative and production teams. SAVVIS' credentials and heritage in the print and publishing industry, coupled with the flexible portfolio of managed infrastructure services to allow us to scale our business, were key selling points for CMPi. Effectively, the deal will enable our IT department to be more dedicated to mission critical projects.''

SAVVIS will host CMPi's entire critical IT infrastructure, including its email, financial services, business intelligence and CRM systems and will provide managed hosting for several of CMPi's websites on SAVVIS' managed utility blade platform. SAVVIS will also manage secure network connections between a number of CMPi's global offices.

The print and publishing industry is a deadline driven environment, so speed-to-market is essential. SAVVIS' secure content exchange application and network has enabled the rapid distribution of large volumes of electronic data between CMPi and its suppliers over the past 6 years. This end-to-end workflow accelerates the production, review and approval process of published content.

Richard Warley, International Managing Director at SAVVIS remarked, ''SAVVIS has a wealth of experience within the print and publishing sector and it is clear to see that more and more companies are looking to outsource their IT infrastructure to keep up with the demand for online material and news as it happens. Our flexible hosting offering will enable CMPi to provide a reliable service to its customers whilst enabling it to grow rapidly on a global scale.''

Operating internationally, CMPi delivers targeted integrated business media solutions to around 20 industry sectors. Its products, including magazines, exhibitions, conferences, awards, information products and websites, target marketers, buyers and sellers across a range of markets; these include Construction and Architecture, Commercial Property, Food and Pharma Ingredients, Security, Interiors and Licensed Trade.

Amongst its well-established brands are industry-leading publications such as Building, Property Week, The Publican and Farmers Guardian. It also has a number of exhibitions recognised as the pre-eminent events in their respective market sectors; these include CPhI, The Interiors Event and IFSEC.

CMPi's magazines reach over 780,000 readers directly through subscription and controlled circulation. Each year, over 330,000 business professionals and marketers visit its exhibitions each year. CMPi has approximately 1,200 employees in the UK, US, Asia and Europe and in 2007 generated over 190m pounds in revenues.

SAVVIS, Inc. is a global IT infrastructure services firm, for business applications. With an IT services platform spanning North America, Europe, and Asia, SAVVIS delivers secure, reliable and scalable hosting, network and application services. The solutions are designed to enable customers to focus on core business, while SAVVIS endeavors to ensure the quality of IT systems and operations. SAVVIS combines virtualization technology, a global network and 29 data centers, with automated management and provisioning systems.

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BLADE's new switch provides the ability to use six 1-Gigabit copper and three 10-Gigabit SFP+ fiber uplinks concurrently - for 50 percent more bandwidth than alternative blade switch offerings. BLADE’s new switch applies the principles of ''Rackonomics'' to ''scale out'' and virtualize data center networks, driving down the total cost of ownership associated with high-performance clusters and virtualized data centers that require an affordable migration path to 10 Gigabit Ethernet.

The BLADE 1/10Gb switch features:

• Power consumption that is 33 to 50 percent lower than alternative blade switches
• Layer 2/3 support for advanced features such as Open Shortest Path First (OSPF) and Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) built-in at no additional cost, and
• Extensive network virtualization capabilities such as VMReady.

The BLADE switch is priced up to 50 percent less than alternative blade switches.

The BLADE 1/10Gb switch with Nortel/BNT Extensions to IBM BladeCenter Open Fabric Manager I/O virtualization software enables multiple embedded blade server switches to operate as one large virtual switch using stacking. Stacking allows switches to be easily combined into one logical unit. In addition, customers can exploit the advantages of automated fail over or moves without the need for manual address re-assignment- reducing the coordination normally required between server and network administrators.

Vikram Mehta, President and CEO of BLADE Network Technologies remarked, ''Bringing 1/10 Gigabit Ethernet connectivity to IBM BladeCenter simplifies the network and reduces cost-of-ownership, while improving overall system performance. Our Rackonomics approach means giving customers the option to affordably and easily implement both Gigabit and 10 Gigabit Ethernet as they scale out and virtualize their data center networks. We are pleased that IBM chose BLADE to provide IBM BladeCenter clients with active 1/10 Gigabit functionality.''

The BLADE switch helps customers build a unified LAN and Ethernet-based storage fabric (iSCSI or NAS), while also providing extreme flexibility with a combination of 1Gb and 10Gb ports as applications require. Advantages of using BLADE's Nortel 1/10Gb Uplink Ethernet Switch Module on IBM BladeCenter include:

• Lowest Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) for networks transitioning from 1 Gigabit to 10 Gigabit Ethernet.
• Enterprise-class Layer 3 features standard - Routing Information Protocol (RIP), Open Shortest Path First (OSPF), Border Gateway Protocol (BGP), and others.
• More power efficient green design.
• Reduced network complexity, cable management and troubleshooting.
• Best way to equip blade servers for increased I/O for network virtualization.
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• IPv6 capable.