Sprint offers path to multi-site managed nets

Sprint today announced a new managed service offering designed to bring companies with multiple sites online quickly and cheaply. Sprint is overhauling the billing and support for its managed services portfolio, charging customers a base rate from $150 to $180 per site to bring branch and remote offices onto an enterprises IP VPN, instead of “nickel and diming” each site for each managed service they purchase, said Mickey O’Dell, director of managed services product management for Sprint.

“We just have one set price which scales downward the more sites you bring online,” O’Dell said. “For say a retail chain with 5000 offices this makes things very simple.”

Sprint began offering its managed services portfolio last fall, offering network design, installation and implementation, monitoring and fault management over IP and frame relay networks. The new Express Multi-Site offering extends that same portfolio, but provides a quick way for companies to bring multiple sites up, often in less than 60 days, O’Dell said.

Sprint has no plans to package the managed services bundle with access services, since the two are fundamentally different businesses, but Sprint will offer the portfolio over other carriers last miles services, ranging from T-1 to dial-up lines.

Though no customers have been brought online as of yet, Sprint has already received bids from prospective customers, varying in size from 150 to 6000 sites.