General Motors signed a five-year, nearly $1 billion contract with AT&T earlier this week. The carrier says it’s the largest commercial deal in its 120-year history. That aside, the deal is more about getting your carrier to work for you, says GM’s group vice president and CIO Ralph Szygenda. He talked with Network World senior editor Denise Pappalardo about what AT&T is doing for GM and how that fits in with GM’s overall globalization plan.

GM has worked with AT&T for the past five years, and part of the new contact is an extension of existing services. Could you talk about what’s new with this contract?

AT&T is now managing network performance for GM’s other service providers globally. There are many telecom providers throughout the world that support our overall network. It would be nice to have one provider that has a network across the world to support you totally. That’s not in the cards right now. But I want consistency across the network throughout the world with a common monitoring environment. . . . AT&T is now doing this for GM.

Has GM been doing WAN monitoring in house or trying to buy from other providers?

The reason you haven’t been able to buy this service is because of fragmentation in the telecommunications market. Now I’m running a real-time operation where my processes are global across the world I don’t have the time to do [network performance monitoring]. I’ve been trying to do this for five years, and AT&T has now matured to this level. Now GM can say to AT&T, manage this environment across suppliers and make it look like one.

AT&T should be supplying common processes, common ways to monitor the environment, making sure this all works together. We selected the company we thought had the greatest bandwidth to do that, and that’s AT&T. It’s a very different model. I’m not sure if any other company in the world has moved to this model. But it’s an important thing if GM is going to be successful.