Global Crossing expands its distribution model

After a couple of years restructuring its business, including its operating environment, Global Crossing has opened that environment to customers through an Intelligent Front Office initiative announced last week.

The carrier’s IFO, built for the most part by Global Crossing using Microsoft’s .NET framework, expands the electronic bonding Global Crossing currently has with its customers to allow them almost direct access to billing, ordering and performance information. It also allows enterprise customers and those customer’s Global Crossing calls "Fast-Track" customers--regional, national or other carriers with large but not international networks--to access raw data about bandwidth utilization, network alarms, CPE performance and historical data.

"Customers want to manage data the way they manage it internally. They don’t want to change their entire infrastructure just to log onto our portal and look at information the way we do. The open interfaces allow them to do that," said Dan Wagner, chief information officer and executive vice president of business infrastructure at Global Crossing.

Global Crossing’s recently announced Fast-Track Services, a portfolio of wholesale business solutions for service providers, allows them to expand their geographic reach and broaden their range of converged IP service offerings. The Fast-Track Services portfolio includes a full range of network services with two go-to-market options: Global Crossing Signature Services, which allow service providers to market these network services under their own brand to their customers, and Global Crossing Alliance Services, which lets service providers co-brand the network services with Global Crossing.

The IFO will help Global Crossing expand what Wagner calls its indirect distribution model, which is somewhere between wholesale services and enterprise managed services.

"Most companies don’t, and never will, have the capability to sell global IP services and connect to the world. We want to enable as many service providers as possible to do that quickly," Wagner said.

By opening its back office systems to those of other carrier customers and enterprises, Global Crossing said it could offer much more than traditional telecom facilities.

"Customers don’t want to be approached in the traditional way of pipes and minutes, they want to see what the whole service looks like. And that’s what we enable through this IFO," Wagner said.

In the course of its restructuring, Global Crossing also consolidated and simplified its own processes and systems before opening them to customers. The carrier reduced approximately 16 billing systems to two, 15 to 20 ordering systems to one and consolidated under one trouble ticket platform (from Clarify) and one alarming platform (from Micromuse.) Much of the rest of its major back office systems were built internally, Wagner said.

He also said that the company expects to announce soon that it has become a fully funded business. "You have to have financial stability to have legitimacy in the marketplace and we are thrilled at the prospect of that coming true. In the next couple of weeks, that issue will close itself."