Exodus to host Merrill Lynch's online investing

AT&T Solutions and Web hosting provider Exodus are collaborating on a contract to provide the infrastructure for Merrill Lynch's much-touted online investing site.

The two vendors were chosen as Merrill Lynch gears up to offer online investing services, fulfilling an announcement the firm recently made that it had decided to join the electronic investing field after denouncing it in the past.

Merrill Lynch has outsourced much of its enterprise network operations to AT&T for several years, and now Merrill Lynch will host its investing site at Exodus' Jersey City, N.J. high-speed Web hosting center. AT&T will provide network speeds up to OC-48 and some project management tasks for the investing site.

AT&T officials admit that although the announcement is officially an AT&T/Exodus "collaboration," the statement could also be read as Merrill Lynch rejecting Web hosting from its current network-services outsourcer - AT&T - in favor of a new player.

AT&T is planning its own Web hosting center in Manhattan as part of a plan announced last month to open a dozen such sites. But Merrill Lynch's need to get its online venture up and running pronto apparently worked against AT&T winning the business all for itself.

"They might have done it [through AT&T] if they had a little more time, but they didn't," says Rick Roscitt, president of AT&T Solutions, the telecom giant's outsourcing and managed-network unit.

Merrill Lynch itself will write the bulk of the applications software for its online investing venture.

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