[qi:051] Savvis (s SVVS), long a provider of co-location and dedicated hosting services, today unveiled a new cloud compute offering aimed at large corporations. Unlike Amazon (s AMZN), whose array of services are focused on the broader market, Savvis will start off with an on-demand computing service called Savvis Cloud Compute.

This new offer is based on a legacy Savvis product called Virtual Intelligent Hosting, which was built on Hewlett Packard (s HWP) servers, VMWare (s VMWR) software and 3Par (s TPAR) storage. Savvis has re-tweaked that offering by developing a portal to access the compute services and marring them to management tools, also developed by the company. The portal is called the Savvis Station Portal.

The service will come in two flavors. One will be a dedicated offering for the exclusive use of a corporation, and the other will be a multi-tenant service much like Amazon’s EC2. Bryan Doerr, chief technology officer of St. Louis, Mo., based Savvis, doesn’t see the company as an Amazon competitor. The pricing model is quite different from Amazon, and the service isn’t quite as granular. “Not all clouds are created equal, and there is a lot of room in the market,” he said in a conversation earlier this morning. Doerr reiterated the point we have been making for a long time — there will be many clouds, each with a different focus and unique features. Many believe that cloud computing is going to grow much faster than, say, managed IT services, because it helps corporations retain control and gives them more flexibility.

“Enterprises want to be more in control of the asset base and what we are making available is just that,” Doerr said. IDC estimates spending on IT cloud services to grow nearly threefold by 2012, to $42 billion, up from $16.2 billion in 2008. Like Savvis, other large managed services providers such as Rackspace (s RAC) and Terremark (s TMRK) have expanded to cloud services.

When I asked Bryan if this move was as a result of a competitive threat from Amazon, he said not. “Amazon has done a good job of showing that there is a market for the user-directed, flexible platform we call the cloud experience,” said Doerr. “It has captured the imagination of all buyers. That is a motivation, clearly.” He wants to build that cloud experience into all of his company’s products targeting the big corporations.

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