Hosted Solutions Inks Deal With Belk, Inc.

Hosted Solutions, the East Coast’s premier data center and managed services provider, announced today that it has signed a multimillion dollar deal with Belk, Inc., to provide hosting and managed services for its totally updated Belk.com Web site.
The new site provides customers with an entirely new online shopping experience that reflects the essence of Belk and marks the beginning of a long-term commitment by Belk to provide a state-of-the-art online shopping channel for customers. The new Belk.com features a wide assortment of fashion apparel, accessories and shoes plus a large selection of cosmetics, home and gift merchandise. Many top name fashion brands are offered along with many of Belk’s exclusive private brands. The site debuted last month with more than 50,000 items available for purchase, and will offer more than 100,000 items by year-end.

Charlotte-based Belk’s re-launch of its ecommerce site will provide customers with added shopping and service convenience. It was imperative for Belk to find a hosting provider that could provide the full spectrum of managed services to guarantee that the site was secure and available to customers 24/7/365.

Hosted Solutions will provide its full roster of services to support the new multi-site ecommerce infrastructure including fully managed, dedicated hardware across Windows, Linux, and Solaris Operating Systems, SAN and NAS storage platforms, managed virtualization, clustered firewalls, IDS/IPS, load-balancing, high availability clustering and comprehensive 24/7 monitoring and management.

“This is an exciting time in the history of Belk,” said Belk, Inc. executive vice president and chief information officer Roddy Kerr. “Finding the right hosting partner was an important priority for us when deciding to launch our ecommerce site. We needed a partner that could deliver a fully managed solution and guarantee 100 percent uptime across multiple SAS70 data centers Hosted Solutions clearly met our technical requirements and our company cultures were very similar. We are both committed to maintaining relationships of integrity, honesty and fairness with customers, associates, vendors and other partners.”

“Belk has created a reputation for prestige and customer service among shoppers and maintained that strong heritage since 1888. They promise their customers honest and fair treatment, full value for every dollar, and satisfaction in every way each time they shop at Belk,” said Josh Wolff, Regional Sales Manager for Hosted Solutions in Charlotte, N.C. “We are honored that Hosted Solutions allows Belk to extend the same promise and experience to their online customers.”
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About Hosted Solutions:
Hosted Solutions’ high quality Data Center and Managed Hosting services maintain and protect customers’ mission-critical IT systems and applications, enabling them to reduce operating costs, lower the risk of downtime, focus on core competencies, and achieve their top business objectives. The company operates SAS 70 Certified facilities in Boston MA, Charlotte NC, Raleigh NC, and Cary NC providing best-of-breed data center operations with hardened physical infrastructure, the highest level of security, and a complete managed services portfolio. For more information please visit www.hostedsolutions.com.
About Belk, Inc.
Charlotte, N.C.-based Belk, Inc. is the largest privately owned department store company in the United States with 307 stores in 16 southern states. The company was founded in 1888 by William Henry Belk in Monroe, N.C., and is in the third generation of Belk family leadership.