Although questions about SBC’s pending acquisition of AT&T won’t be answered any time soon, we caught up with Hossein Eslambolchi, president of AT&T global networking technology services, at Interop for the latest news about the deal and an update on the core developments he has been pushing in AT&T for several years.
Eslambolchi, who also holds the titles of president of AT&T Labs, and AT&T CTO and CIO, said the soonest the merger will happen is in 2006. Nothing has been announced about company structure, but he says the core groups probably will consist of business services, consumer service, long-distance consumer, government solutions and wireless. And of course, some form of labs.
In terms of the company networks and IT environments, Eslambolchi said the long-distance assets will be integrated, the AT&T global IP network will become the standard because SBC leases capacity from other carriers, and it is likely that AT&T’s IT systems will be retained because of their efficiency.
Many of those efficiencies stem from two of Eslambolchi’s pet projects, the Concept of One and the Concept of Zero, which the company has been working on for three years.
Under the Concept of One, Eslambolchi has pushed to consolidate the 800 disparate AT&T systems used to manage the network. “We’re down to 350 today and the objective is get it down to 20-50 by year-end 2007.” As an example, AT&T used to have a fault management system for IP, another for optical, another for frame relay, etc. Now it has a global fault management system that can correlate alarms and faults, so it is evident a fiber cut also is responsible for a frame problem.
With the Concept of Zero, Eslambolchi is striving to reduce the human-to-human and human-to-computer interactions required to get work done. The goal: automate everything possible. One success story: The company used to have several hundred Web portals for business services. They have since been rolled into one portal called AT&T BusinessDirect, which automates order-handling.
That portal now supports 25 million transactions annually and has reduced cycle times for processes such as ordering IP service from 120 days to less than 26, Eslambolchi claims. “Orders used to be handled 12 times, now 90% are not touched by humans.”
Taken together, he says the advances have enabled AT&T to improve network performance and the customer experience while scaling back head count over the years from 55,000 to 21,000. If your experience is different, let us know.
As for Eslambolchi, his next trick will be extending the advances to SBC.
