Outsourcing offers new hope for the global WAN

Picture this: you want to make a long-distance phone call, but before you can make it, you must broker a contract between your local phone company and the providers of the three other local and long-distance networks that will carry the call.

Or this: you want to get onto the Internet, but before you can do it, you must integrate the disparate technologies of your local phone company, your cable access provider and your ISP.

Such is the plight of most network executives who want to build a global WAN to serve all of their employees and business partners. They want to deliver a consistent set of communications capabilities and services - at a consistent level of performance - across all of their business geographies. Yet before they can achieve this simple goal, IT and telecommunications managers must integrate services and technologies from dozens of different providers in a complex web of contracts and interconnections.

The problem, put simply, is that telecommunications services are regional. The U.S. has many local and long-distance providers, France has several carriers, China has its own network. To carry traffic simultaneously and uniformly across the globe, a large enterprise must hammer out separate contracts with at least one regional carrier in each country - and then find some way of integrating and managing all of those separate services so that they at least appear to be a single network.

To make matters worse, most regional service providers don't work well together. Yes, there are some standards for transmitting management and provisioning information across carriers' operational support systems. But most regional providers are focused primarily on managing service in their own geography, and put very few resources into interconnecting with other providers.

The Internet was supposed to solve this problem, but it hasn't even come close. The fact is that the public Internet is simply too unreliable and too insecure to serve as an infrastructure for multinational business. Corporations may use it to reach out-of-the-way places, or small offices, but chances are it will never offer the guaranteed levels of performance and availability that most Fortune 500 enterprises need.

Some years ago, the major regional and international carriers tried to solve the problem by forming alliances designed to deliver common services across the globe. But alliances such as Global One and Concert found that the technological, political and competitive challenges they faced were simply too great to overcome. Most of these alliances have delivered service to few customers, and most network executives have little hope that they will ever provide a real solution.

Some enterprises have attempted to solve the global WAN problem by outsourcing it to multinational systems integrators. This approach has helped corporations to offload the integration effort, but it has done little to solve the integration problem itself - the systems integrator must do the same bilateral contract negotiation and service interconnection that the enterprise would have done.

The global WAN integration problem is so long-standing and complex that most enterprises - like most service providers - have come to accept it as a property of networking. But a few service providers have begun evaluating an emerging technology that could enable them to more easily interconnect and deliver services across their networks: collaborative commerce.

This new collaborative technology, typified by technology and services offered by upstart Nexagent, essentially enables service providers to outsource the provider-to-provider interconnection. Through a common technology platform and services, Nexagent can link a provider to many other providers, enabling it to deliver global services without establishing complex bilateral connections in advance.

Collaborative technology is new, and only a few service providers have begun to look into it. But if it takes hold, there may be hope that global WAN services, like the hops on a long-distance phone call, may one day be transparent to the user.

Senior Analyst Tim Wilson is with Enterprise Management Associates in Boulder, Colo., an analyst and market research firm focusing exclusively on all aspects of enterprise management. Wilson has over 10 years of experience in covering e-business and enterprise management issues, most recently with InternetWeek, where he was chief of reporters. He can be reached by clicking here.

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