NaviSite Helps Prepare for the Worst

Customers of managed ASP NaviSite Inc. (NASDAQ: NAVI) can now take advantage of NaviSite’s Instant Capacity and Instant Availability services, which will provide the ability to provision servers on-demand, allowing an immediate response to surges in Internet traffic without extensive prior capacity planning.

“These services will provide customers with a cost-effective alternative to up-front costs for anticipating peak demand,” said NaviSite’s CEO Joel Rosen. “In addition to the obvious customer benefits, the automatic provisioning of servers will also mean faster recovery times for NaviSite, and therefore will be an important step toward enhancing our already industry-leading operational metrics, including up-time and mean time to repair.”

NaviSite’s Instant Capacity Service serves enterprise customers with e-commerce sites who want to ensure they maintain enough capacity to accommodate fluctuations in customer traffic, particularly around peak selling times, holidays and marketing promotions, and must be positioned to accommodate unexpected bursts in traffic.

The service is intended to save customers both time and money by allowing them to set specific thresholds, such as for site traffic or web server CPU utilization, that determine when to trigger the automatic provisioning of additional capacity.

The Instant Availability Service responds to a significant concern regarding a company’s web operations – how much redundancy to allocate to ensure site availability if server outages occur. This service is designed to automatically detect certain hardware and software failures in web servers, and quickly bring new servers online to replace the component causing the outage.

“Enterprise customers faced with planning for unanticipated fluctuations in traffic are looking for more flexible managed service offerings that provide the ability to increase capacity on demand,” said Ted Chamberlin, senior analyst at Gartner. “NaviSite’s Instant Capacity and Instant Availability services are intended to specifically address this challenge by allowing customers to handle variations in traffic through near-instant provisioning of web servers. This can virtually eliminate concerns regarding capacity and site availability.”

A formal beta program for Instant Capacity and Instant Availability is planned for Summer 2001.

NaviSite, based in Andover, Mass., is a majority-owned operating company of CMGI Inc. with minority investment from Microsoft Corp.