BellSouth Business will expand its services this summer to include network analysis, planning and design.
The company will add a group of four assessment services to its network services and hardware offerings. The new services, grouped under the name Enterprise Network Consulting, comprise:
- Performance assessment
- Capacity planning
- Security consulting
- Design and planning
BellSouth Business caters to midsize and large companies based in the BellSouth region, which includes Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina and Tennessee. It extends its services to wherever those businesses have offices, in the U.S. or in other countries.
Tucker Federal Bank in Tucker, Ga., outside Atlanta, says it will beta-test the performance assessment service to get a handle on its network needs.
The bank has 28 sites connected by a combination of T-1s and frame relay links but needs to measure how much of the bandwidth on those lines is actually used. "We don't know how much excess capacity we have," says Sheila Ray, chief operating officer for the bank.
The evaluation will help the bank find areas where demand for bandwidth is growing so it can provide more before those areas become bottlenecks, according to Ray. "We wanted to make a preemptive strike," she says.
The bank chose BellSouth Business because it already buys other services from the carrier. "They seemed very well equipped and competent," Ray says.
The four new services range in price from $20,000 to several hundred thousand, depending on which you buy and how large your network is, BellSouth says.
Each service includes a set of features: Performance assessment includes a network health check and an assessment of the performance of applications, frame relay and LAN. Capacity planning offers planning for both applications and network transport. Security provides security awareness and education, policy development, network security assessment, security architecture evaluation, and planning to consolidate security and migrate to new security architecture. Design and planning includes an audit and inventory of the network, design and planning of network revisions.
