It has appointed media service account managers James Marshall and Jason Boney to handle sales. Marshall returned to Wam!Net, having left in 2003, while Boney joins from hosting and technology firm Globix.

Savvis has also appointed a four-strong team of post-sales specialists and engineers, all with previous Wam!Net or 4Sight experience.

The team comprises Martin Garrett, Ralph Thiel, Scott Eaton and Petra Van Den Berg, who has moved over from Holland where she focused on the newspaper market for Wam!Net. The appointments follow that of Craig Santus, who joined as senior account manager.

Savvis has put the problems it encountered when transferring its 200 UK customers from the Wam!Net network to Savvis' own network behind it. The final transfers took place in March, and despite the high level of dissatisfaction expressed at the time, Savvis EMEA managing director Richard Warley said he was surprised by how few customers were lost.

"There was a limited amount of customer churn," he said. "I put that down to how embedded the Wam!Net application is and the Wam!Net user community."

Customers that had started the process to cancel contracts are halting those cancellations, according to Santus. The firm's reinvestment in software is starting to bear fruit with Transmission Director X for OS X and Windows XP, a Beta release of a new version of Internet Gateway and developments, including file-checking and the adoption of JDF.

Story by Barney Cox