BT Americas looks to higher-value services

BT Americas will offer more application and integration services in 2004 as part of a strategy to provide its corporate customers with higher-value offerings than raw bandwidth or Internet access.

“Our strategy is to move away from just the network layer and more into the applications area,” says Kevin Moss, director of product operations for BT Americas. Already, BT Americas supports such common network applications as messaging, Web hosting and broadcast.

BT Americas recently began offering a package of services for CRM applications that includes everything from bandwidth to call center support. Over the next few months, BT Americas will unveil similar packages around mobility, security and remote access, Moss says.

BT Americas is also expanding its systems integration services, capacity planning and outsourcing capabilities.

As an example, Moss points to an outsourcing deal that BT Americas has with Unilever, which involves consulting and systems integration support as well as management of the food manufacturer’s entire communications infrastructure. About 20% of Unilever’s traffic goes over BT Americas’ U.S. backbone.

Similarly, BT Americas is managing and delivering communications and networking services to 220 Honeywell sites throughout Western Europe. BT Americas will manage all of Honeywell’s voice communications as well as its LAN infrastructure, mobile communications, video and Internet access. BT Americas also will manage Honeywell’s WAN and handle migration from a frame-relay/ATM network to the MPLS-based IP network.

Increasingly, BT Americas wants to pursue deals like these with Honeywell and Unilever so that the ISP will be central to their customers’ information technology services.

“We want our customers to go from taking our technology to turning that into working with customers on their information and communications technology strategy,” Moss says.

Next up for BT Americas is creating service-level agreements (SLA) that focus on the end-to-end performance of key applications, including the availability of applications and on-time delivery of the data. These SLAs include everything from the customer premises equipment to the Internet access to the IP packet delivery to the jitter on the MPLS backbone.

“Where we’re really headed is that we want applications to work,” Moss says.