AT&T to spend $1B on global network, business services this year
With a planned expenditure of $1 billion this year, AT&T intends to keep building out its global network -- as well as that of IBM -- while also delivering new services and network-based applications to businesses of all sizes.
Through an expanded agreement with IBM inked in 2007, AT&T and IBM are now teaming up on providing networking and computer-based services and applications to multinational corporations on a platform that increasingly integrates the global networks of both vendors. However, AT&T's $1 billion investment will also support many new services for customers of its own long-time global business network.
For the integrated services from AT&T and IBM, AT&T last year added on-the-ground and networking support in 48 countries and closed more than a dozen new contracts, AT&T said in a statement today.
Functionality to be added this year for the mutual multinational enterprise customers includes virtual private network (VPN) access in 18 more countries; the start of Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) deployment under a multi-year plan; and new services such as AT&T Wavelength Private Line, a managed service supporting wide area transport over protocols such as gigabit and 10-gigabit Ethernet.
Meanwhile, new capabilities for AT&T's own global network this year will include increasing AT&T's hosting capacity at several data centers in the US, UK, and Asia-Pacific; expanding AT&T's "super IDC" hosting services to include more on-net managed applications, such as software from Oracle and SAP; and enhancing AT&T's Intelligent Content Distribution Service in several countries with support for Adobe Flash, Microsoft's Silverlight, and Windows Media Format (WMF), for example.
On the mobility side, AT&T eyes continued investment this year in services such as AT&T Mobile Enterprise Applications; location-based services (LBS); and Enterprise on Demand, a platform for customer self-management of large wireless data deployments of specialized vertical devices.