WRAL Local Tech Wire — October 29, 2009
NBA superstar LeBron James and his Cleveland Cavaliers have a new home on the Web, and it’s riding in the cloud computing service offered by Raleigh-based Hosted Solutions.In a deal announced Thursday, the Cavaliers said they had selected Hosted as the services provider to maintain theQarena.com, the team’s Web site. The Cavs picked Hosted’s recently announce Stratus Trusted Cloud offering that includes the ability to scale needed services on demand while cutting costs and delivering reliability of service.
Financial terms were not disclosed.
Hosted is an IT infrastructure as a service provider with data centers in Raleigh, Cary, Charlotte and suburban Boston.
The Cavaliers were looking to outsource the arena Web site since they expected increased Internet traffic in this their 40th season with James and new arrival Shaquille O’Neal driving ticket sales. The arena, which is also known as the Q and is sponsored by Quicken, is also home to the American Hockey League Lake Erie Monsters and hosts numerous special events, such as concerts.
To meet growing ticket demand, the Cavs recently signed a deal with digital marketing and ticket service Veritix for online sales and secondary ticket sales.
The Hosted cloud service enables the Cavaliers to meet surges in demand without having to buy additional equipment or hire additional staff.
“Stratus allows them to “burst” at peak times, meaning they can exceed their normal compute, storage and bandwidth limits and provides instantaneous access to critical IT resources to accommodate spikes in traffic,” Kip Turco, chief technology officer at Hosted, told Local Tech Wire and WRAL.com. “ Outsourcing the IT piece to us allows the Cavs to focus on what they do best - winning games.”
Cloud computing enables collaboration of IT resources in a shared, secure and scalable server environment designed to meet enterprise-level network demands.
“The upcoming year is sized up to be ‘XL’ in every way, including our fans’ interest in tickets to see the Cavaliers, Lake Erie Monsters, concerts, special events, and family shows,” said Jeff Lillibridge, the team’s Web services director. “We feel the scalability and dependability of Hosted Solutions’ Stratus Trusted Cloud is a perfect match to support our needs, which in turn allows us to provide our fans the level of service they deserve.”
The number of customers utilizing Hosted’s cloud service is increasing, Turco said. The company also works with several other professional sports franchises.
“The demand for an ‘always on’ IT environment is not unique to the Cleveland Cavaliers,” said Rich Lee, Hosted Solutions’ founder and chief executive officer, in a statement. “Any company doing business online requires the highest degree of reliability; even a short amount of downtime in this competitive economy can hurt significantly.
"The Cavaliers’ decision to deploy the Stratus Trusted Cloud for their arena Web site confirms its value for firms seeking a reliable, consistent and secure approach to ensuring that their website is up and running when they, and their customers, need it most," he added.
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