MCI beefs up managed LAN offering

MCI Communications today announced guaranteed repair times for its Managed LAN service, designed specifically to help companies line up resources to support voice over IP. The company will now promise to restore service for Managed LANs in 3.5 hours, and will extend the network restoration guarantees of its Managed WAN service to the local area network customers as well.

“Many of our enterprise customers are getting ready for the move to VoIP – we see that as very pervasive,” said Jim DeMerlis, vice president of managed network services for MCI. One of the stumbling blocks for many companies in the move to integrate voice and data onto one network is reconfiguring their LANs with the bandwidth needed to support voice. As part of its Managed LAN service, MCI will conduct assessments and advise its customers on how to prepare for VoIP, he said.

MCI also unveiled new performance guarantees for LAN device availability, saying it will support 99.95% availability for core LAN devices that are shared resources, and 99.5% availability for workgroup LAN devices, said John Shultz, senior director of managed network services. And the company will provide Service Level Agreements that cover third-party networks, becoming the single point of contact for customers whose LANs may still fall under a service contract from an equipment vendor such as Cisco Systems.

Cracking the existing service contract market will likely be MCI’s biggest challenge in the Managed LAN Services arena, said Current Analysis analyst Brian Washburn.

“Folks like the Cisco authorized agents are going to be their competitors here,” he said. “They already provide the equipment to the enterprises and the maintenance contract is often just an add-on. People don’t think of MCI when they buy their Ethernet switches and by the time the MCI account team gets to them, they already have a maintenance agreement.”

Realizing that, MCI will offer a six-hour repair Service Level Agreement to companies that are still under contract to third parties, Shultz said, with the expectation that when the service contract expires, the company’s full business will come to MCI.

“This allows them to offload the complexity of operating these networks and at the same time, lower their total cost of ownership by eliminating costly downtime,” he said. “We can minimize their risk in managing technology changes and upgrades and, where they want us to, augment and work with their existing staff.”

MCI is moving away from a mean time to repair standard and adopting a time-to-repair standard to differentiate itself from other players, he added. In the U.S., the time to repair promise is 3.5 hours and in key global markets, it is four hours. Those markets include Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Norway, Singapore, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the U.K.

Under the terms of the SLAs, MCI will offer up to a 100% credit for loss of device availability, Shultz added.

The company said it has seen rapid growth of the Managed LAN Services offering since it was launched in December of 2004, and is already managed 15,000 devices.