We've released a whitepaper today that explores the market forces impacting VARs, IT firms, and managed service providers. This whitepaper provides some analysis of the impact of the transition to the cloud on IT companies and explains why those firms should be looking at telecom services. It also provides some guidance on how to integrate telecom services into an IT practice and what to look for in a master agent.

You should read the whitepaper.

CenturyLink announced today that they are acquiring Savvis, a leading managed services, hosting, and cloud services provider, for $40 per share in cash and stock — a transaction valued at around $2.5 billion. Given that Gartner recently placed Savvis in the "leader" area of their Magic Quadrant analysis of cloud infrastructure as a service, that puts CenturyLink in a strong competitive position with AT&T and Verizon, two of the other three so-called leaders (Rackspace was the other one).

Combined with CenturyLink's existing hosting center infrastructure (the Qwest CyberCenter footprint), it promises to be a strong combination that helps CenturyLink overcome its appearance as an AT&T/Verizon wannabe.

After a year of negotiations with the Global Crossing team, we're excited to announce that we have finalized the partnership and can begin offering the full suite of Global Crossing services.

A well-known powerhouse in international data, Global Crossing is a strategic partnership for Telephony Partners that provides a key piece in our international strategy, particularly as it relates to Central and South America. Global Crossing's strong international VOIP capabilities also expand our capacity to service companies requiring international SIP services.

At the same time, Global Crossing's domestic data network is extremely robust and attractive, particularly for companies looking for a global data provider capable of competing with AT&T and Verizon.

Overall we are very excited to offer our clients and partners access to the entire suite of Global Crossing service and look forward to a productive relationship.

With the recent release of our new partner portal, we thought it was about time we paid some attention to our public website, which hadn't been redesigned in something like four years. That old site was based on Community Server by Telligent, and while their platform is fantastic, the pricing just doesn't make sense for a simple CMS back-end for a corporate website.

Instead, we decided to use Sitefinity, a CMS put out by Telerik, a company whose development tools we've used in several projects. With the help of 3Eleven Creative, the technical process was simple. Sitefinity's capabilities were great out of the box, and we only needed to do a minimal amount of custom programming to get the results we were looking for.

In addition to the platform and visual design, we decided to do away with the typical marketing-speak in favor of a tone that matches how we work as a company. We applied the same transparency and fun spirit we have with our partners to our public marketing message.

Finally, this new website includes a more robust customer-facing section. We hope this will invite end-user attention that will translate into business for us and our partner network.

Overall we're pleased with the results and hope you are, too.