AT&T spells out international strategy

AT&T revealed plans last week to offer a set of managed services worldwide to counter the imminent demise of Concert Communications, its international joint venture with British Telecom.

The telecom giant announced its blueprint for offering customers around the world the same fully managed services it has offered in the U.S. AT&T classifies its managed service offerings into three categories: Enterprise VPN Services; Hosting Services; and High Availability and Security services.

"We are reinforcing our commitment to customers that we will deliver services and solutions globally across a single integrated network, not just domestically in the U.S.," says David Dorman, president of AT&T.

AT&T is combining products and services from previous partnerships and acquisitions, including Concert and the IBM Global Network, and fine-tuning these assets to offer managed data services, Dorman says. "We had a set of capabilities before, but we haven't coherently articulated those."

AT&T is addressing problems it had with Concert, which included its inability to package AT&T and BT services cohesively, says Brownlee Thomas, an analyst with Giga Information Group. "AT&T's hands were tied because it was also not able to sell directly to business users in Europe and the U.K. under the Concert agreement."

The company plans to offer multinational business users the same services overseas as it does in the U.S., she says. AT&T will offer international customers the same IP VPN and its Multi-protocol Label Switching (MPLS) IP-Enabled Frame Relay services. It currently offers its fully managed IP VPN service in 54 countries, but is only able to support MPLS service in a handful of cities worldwide.

AT&T is investing $300 million building out 80 additional switching nodes and upgrading facilities overseas. The service provider has upgraded between 12 and 20 switching facilities in Europe to support its MPLS offerings, but expects to have 80 sites upgraded by year-end. The company's legacy IBM data network spans 849 cities in 60 countries.

The service provider also is investing $200 million to expand Integrated Global Enterprise Management System (IGEMS), its enhanced management platform, which has been reserved for the company's largest customers that bought customized services through its AT&T Solutions division.

The stretching of IGEMS across AT&T's network and to all managed service customers will let them access a single Web portal to view reports and monitor performance for all their AT&T managed services by year-end, the company says.

The AT&T Managed Services Portal for IP services was launched in September and eventually will include all the company's managed domestic and international service offerings.

Concert will be dissolved fully by the end of the first quarter, which is ahead of schedule, Dorman says.