Masergy enhances cloud reach via Amazon Direct Connect partnership

Masergy is giving its North American customers another option to get to the cloud by offering access to Amazon's (Nasdaq: AMZN) Web Services (AWS) Direct Connect.

Customers will be able to get private, on-net access to AWS by physically interconnecting with Amazon via its East and West Coast data centers. The service provider said this "integration provides direct private access to the AWS suite of products and services in all U.S. regions as well as the AWS GovCloud."

"Our customers said that as we want to drive more mission critical applications we'd like to be able to bring our network fabric directly into these resources," said John Dumbleton, Senior VP Business Development for Masergy, in an interview with FierceTelecom. "When Amazon came out with their Direct Connect offer, we reached back out to our contacts and that started the effort to work with them."

Masergy has direct connections with Amazon in the East and the West via Equinix's (Nasdaq: EQIX) Ashburn, Va. and Sunnyvale, Calif. facilities.

Both of these Points of Presence (PoPs) leverage either Gigabit or multi-Gigabit connections into the Amazon fabric.

Connectivity is only one part of the equation.

Businesses can also optimize their application performance with associated SLAs, the ability to modify services in real time as needed and an Intelligent Network Analyst to view and track all network traffic.  

One of the key elements of it offers customers that need connectivity to Amazon's cloud service is the bandwidth on demand function. Customers can adjust speeds in 50 Mbps increments starting as low as 50 Mbps and up to 10 Gbps.

"With our ability modify bandwidth on the fly, if you need to go from 100 Meg to 300 Mbps it's simply a matter of logging into the portal and turning the dial and it's done in a matter of seconds," Dumbleton said. "For our customers that are using Amazon this is a great thing because as we migrate them onto these large interconnect they have the ability to increase and decrease bandwidth in real time to meet changing needs or one-time needs."

Amazon is just one of several cloud provider relationships Masergy has. It also works with IBM/Softlayer (NYSE: IBM), iland, Cirracore, and RapidScale.

Dumbleton said a lot these relationships were driven by the fact that "our customers were interested or were already doing business with those folks."  

Expanding its cloud portfolio has been an ongoing effort for Masergy. In addition to its partnership with Amazon, the service provider purchased Broadcore Communications in 2012, a deal which gives it a set of cloud-based unified communications services including call center, SIP Trunking and custom integration capabilities to serve its large multinational corporation (MNC) customers.

For more:
- see the release

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Updated article on Feb. 5 with quotes from John Dumbleton, Senior VP Business Development for Masergy.