AT&T offers Web hosting enhancements

AT&T is bringing more monitoring capabilities to its Web hosting customers while expanding the geographic reach and capacity of its hosting centers this year.

The carrier announced Monday that it is making its “patent-pending visual monitoring tool,” available to AT&T Enterprise Hosting Service customers, says Chris Costello, director of product management for Managed Hosting Services at AT&T.

The tool, which was developed by AT&T Labs lets users see from a business perspective, the relationship between “server and application assets across a hosted environment,” Costello says. The monitoring software also allows customers to drill down to access more specific Web hosting performance metrics and open trouble tickets.

The carrier also announced that it has enhanced its report generating tool on its BusinessDirect customer portal. The tool lets customers run reports on server usage and other server components.

In addition to its announcement, the carrier talked about additional Web hosting developments planned for upcoming months.

Since AT&T acquired USi in September for $300 million last fall the carrier has been working on integrating the application hosting company’s services and customer support with its new parent, Costello says.

This month AT&T plans to announce that legacy USi customers will be able to access their services through AT&T’s BusinessDirect portal, Costello says. This will allow legacy USi and new USi customers the ability to use a single portal to manage all of their USi and AT&T services.

The carrier is also working on integrating USi, which is run as a wholly owned subsidiary of AT&T, from an operational standpoint, she says. That integration is about six months out.

Part of that operational integration includes bringing AT&T’s IGEMs platform together with USi’s Oasis application management platform. “We have a number of incentives to make the client experience seamless regardless if you are an AT&T hosting or network service or USi service customer,” Costello says. That includes the carrier’s Web hosting sales force.

“We have trained AT&T hosting specialists to sell USi capabilities,” Costello says. “The sales force is locked and loaded so they are working seamlessly in front of the client. That was our first and foremost goal.”

The legacy USi sales folks are being brought in as specialists further along in the sales process she says.

The carrier is also working on new utility computing and server virtualization capabilities, which it rolled out last year in a “controlled introduction.” Costello says the carrier is looking at “best of capabilities across multiple platforms and also looking at adding new capabilities.”

AT&T is also “expanding in key domestic and global markets this year,” Costello says. “You’ll see announcements about power augments, expansions within existing data centers domestically and globally and announcement around new markets where we don’t have existing centers today.”

Costello could not offer more details on these expansion plans.