ST. LOUIS, January 6, 2011 /PRNewswire/ -- Savvis, Inc. , a global leader in cloud infrastructure and hosted IT solutions for enterprises, today announced that industry analyst firm Gartner, Inc. has positioned it in the visionaries quadrant in the Magic Quadrant for "Managed Security Service Providers (MSSPs), North America" published Nov. 29 and authored by Kelly M. Kavanagh and John Pescatore.

According to Gartner, "Companies in the visionaries quadrant have demonstrated the ability to turn a strong focus on managed security into high-quality service offerings for the MSS market. These service providers are often strong contenders for enterprises requiring frequent interaction with MSS analysts, flexible service delivery options and strong customer service. Visionaries quadrant MSSPs have less market coverage and fewer resources or service options compared with leaders quadrant firms."

In the report, Gartner projects continued growth for MSSPs in North America, but with a shift to mid-size or smaller buyers driving price erosion for core services, and the introduction of lower-price, multifunction firewall, log management and other new offerings. Gartner also states that increased enterprise use of software-as-a-services (SaaS) and the "consumerization of IT" will lead to more cloud-based security-as-a-service offerings, which will grow faster than the customer-premises-equipment-focused MSSP market in the second half of 2010 and 2011.

Gartner also states in the report that in 2009, North American MSSPs generated revenue of $1.8 billion, representing growth of 24 percent over 2008, while the number of firewalls and intrusion detection and prevention (IDP) devices under monitoring/management grew more than 20 percent. Gartner predicts that revenue will have grown to $2.3 billion for 2010.

"We are excited to be positioned in the visionaries quadrant in the Managed Security Services Magic Quadrant because we believe it represents significant industry validation of Savvis' managed security services," said Chris Richter, vice present of security products and services for Savvis. "Managed security is a core element of Savvis' virtualized and cloud compute solutions, allowing our enterprise clients to reduce risk as they streamline and optimize their IT infrastructures."

Savvis continues to advance its IT infrastructure services delivery platform and operational support systems throughout North America, Europe and Asia. Savvis currently operates 31 data centers globally, encompassing nearly 1.5 million square feet of space designed to support enterprise and government IT operations.