Carrier essentially repackages hosting, security and VoIP offerings.
AT&T is trying to find the right mix of services to better serve the small-to-midsize business market and leverage some of the successes legacy SBC has seen in its 13-state region.
The carrier is essentially repackaging hosting, security and VoIP offerings from the legacy AT&T side of the house for smaller businesses that have different needs but expect as much from a vendor as a Fortune 500 company.
“According to our research, SMB customers are demanding and expect exactly the same level of service and attention as customers spending $10 million annually with a carrier,” says David Willis, research director at Gartner.
Winning over SMB users hadn’t been easy for the old AT&T.
“AT&T has always had products for the SMB market,” says Brian Washburn, principal analyst at Current Analysis. “But a lot of folks, including AT&T, just didn’t serve that market very strongly.”
But SBC has. “SBC has seen tremendous growth in SMB services in its 13-state region,” Willis says. It’s a matter of duplicating that nationally from a sales and product perspective, he says.
“From the legacy SBC side we’re very strong with roots in the regional marketplace . . . that hasn’t wavered at all,” says John Regan, vice president of marketing. “With the new AT&T we’re looking at how we fill gaps in products and solutions.”
SBC started out with “a ton of DSL customers,” and one of the things AT&T brought was a robust infrastructure in Internet Data Centers across the globe, Regan says. Which is why one of the first services for the SMB market from the new AT&T is in the Web hosting arena.
Last month AT&T launched its Remote Vault Service for the SMB market. It is essentially a remote storage service for server and PC backup. AT&T offers a similar service for larger organizations, but this offering is packaged and priced for smaller companies.
The offering costs about $5 to $10 per gigabyte for server backup, and $6 for the first gigabyte and $2 for each gigabyte thereafter for PC backup.
Now the company is looking at enterprise services, such as VPN, network-based security, intrusion detection, antidistributed denial of service (DoS) offerings and trying to build low-end offerings that work for smaller business customers, Regan says.
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Toward the end of this year and into early 2007, AT&T expects to have a variety of security services available to SMB customers, he says.
AT&T is taking its Internet Protect real-time antidistributed DoS service, its intrusion-detection and -prevention offerings, and repackaging and pricing them for SMB customers. It’s not clear who will sell and support the SMB market nationally. SBC had a local and state sales team structure, Washburn says.
Regan says the SBC structure will remain in place and that both legacy SBC and AT&T sales representatives will serve the SMB market.
“We still have some work to do outside our 13-state region,” Regan says. “We want to play off our strengths and success in the SMB market. The new company clearly recognizes that.”
