ENTERPRISE ENRICHMENT

Public network operators are always presumed to be a little behind the times when it comes to providing private network services. Perhaps that is because two of the most significant telecommunications technology successes in corporate enterprise networking in the last two decades — Ethernet and wireless LANs — have become dominant mediums of data communication in the enterprise without much help from the public network firms.

Now the technologies and services used in the corporate enterprise are evolving again. Corporate users are increasingly relying on voice over IP (VoIP), remote networking and mobile usage — even within their own enterprises — to get their jobs done and get them through the workday. They are demanding more from these solutions, including greater reliability, scalability and security; and in the case of mobile, richer data and content services and the power to manage them within the context of their existing corporate IT environments.

Regardless of past perceptions, carriers do have a long history of providing managed services for enterprises, and they are continuing to evolve to keep pace with the latest turn of events.

For many years, vendors selling products and services directly into the enterprise market have walked the line of trying to position themselves both as a potential partner to carriers looking to serve the enterprise market as well as a competitive alternative for enterprises that wanted state-of-the-art technology and services that carriers either weren't ready to provide or would not. At some points in time, it wasn't such a difficult line to walk, but service providers have begun to improve their ability to serve the enterprise market, and enterprises increasingly need carriers or other types of managed service providers to help them deal with their increasingly complex technology environments, according to Marc Willebeek-LeMair, chief technology and strategy officer for TippingPoint, a division of long-time enterprise solutions giant 3Com.

TippingPoint provides intrusion prevention systems and security management systems that can be implemented by a corporate enterprise or its managed service provider. The company recently launched a series of new converged network security services for the enterprise market.

“Enterprise IT managers are recognizing that they can't handle the increasing security load themselves. There are too many viruses going around and too many different kinds of attacks for that,” said Willebeek-LeMair. “Carriers haven't traditionally been a channel for us, but they have done a good job of building out better customer support. We've also reached a point of no return with voice over IP. Carriers have to take it seriously.”

In addition to security and VoIP, mobile is another technology and service segment causing headaches for corporate enterprise IT teams. These can be somewhat relieved with help from a managed service provider.

The idea of mobile service as a managed network service in the enterprise is relatively new, but the challenges presented by increasing mobile usage among corporate workers is not. Kenny Wyatt, vice president of integrated solutions for Sprint Business Solutions, said the battle to become a corporate enterprise's only wireless services provider is one that might not be worth fighting.

“The wireless carrier decision for an enterprise is made on a myriad of variables, not the least of which is coverage,” Wyatt said. “As much as we'd like, we can't always provide total coverage, especially on an international basis, so for a large enterprise, wireless is something that must be multi-sourced.”

Instead of spending all of its energy to convince IT managers to convert every last device under the enterprise roof to Sprint's mobile service, the carrier, which has offered managed services to its wireline customers for more than 10 years, has launched its Managed Mobility Service and a handful of related services to help ease mobile into the complex and chaotic enterprise environment.

“A lot of mobile devices and service decisions are still being made outside of the corporate IT shop by individual employees,” Wyatt said. “The concept of managing devices as if they were another asset in the IT shop came from our customer advisory council.”

Sprint's Managed Mobility Service includes applications such as security management, over-the-air configuration of new software, asset management and fulfillment and the ability to share minutes across a corporate enterprise. However, the most intriguing aspect of the offering may be a billing management tool that allows IT managers to actively manage mobile billing and usage across the enterprise — even if it is served by multiple carriers. This application requires the enterprise to purchase a Sprint corporate calling plan, but it still reflects an effort to accommodate the nature of an enterprise served by multiple carriers.

“This is the real service aspect of a managed service offering,” Wyatt said. “It creates a single point of contact and reference for a complete set of services. The important part is that it makes the services look integrated.”

Managed Mobility Service is part of a growing family of services from Sprint designed to address the evolving mobile needs of enterprises. Other members of that family include a VPN software client, location-based services and — taking another cue from the managed services Sprint has offered in the wireline world — service level agreements (SLAs) that pledge specific thresholds of reliability and network availability for enterprise mobile customers.

Wyatt said it wasn't difficult to develop this family of services but that Sprint was waiting for a technology evolution of a different kind before it formalized its managed services strategy for mobile enterprises.

“It's not a coincidence that we are launching this at the same time as we are rolling out our [CDMA 1X] EV-DO network,” he said. “That will produce a big change in enterprise usage and applications over the next 18 months. If we had offered some of the services a year ago, it would have been too early. I don't think there would have been enough enterprise demand for managed mobility.”

As managed network services extend into mobile environments, the traditional wireline managed services offered by carriers are not remaining static. Like Sprint, MCI has been in the managed services business for many years but just recently made adjustments to its SLAs to strengthen its competitive differentiation and respond to the heightening expectations of corporate enterprises.

Last month, MCI significantly altered one of the core metrics of its SLAs by changing its “Mean Time to Repair Guarantee” to a “Time to Repair” guarantee of 3.5 hours. The loss of one word makes all the difference, according to Jim DeMerlis, vice president of managed network services for MCI.

The SLA will now be measured on a per-site basis rather than on a network basis, which is really the way it should be,” DeMerlis said. “We're tying the SLA to an individual customer's total cost of downtime and ownership.”

Though MCI's current SLA offerings specifically measure only the reliability and availability of the wide area network services it provides into an enterprise, the carrier also is planning to augment its offering to cover local area network (LAN) services and equipment. Those LAN SLAs may launch within the next couple of months, according to Cliff Cibelli, senior product manager of managed network services for MCI.

Eventually, Cibelli said, MCI also wants to provide SLAs covering wireless LANs. “First, we'll address wired LANs, but wireless LANs are also a big area of focus,” he said. “We'll look to do that sometime in 2006.”

Even as they continue to enhance their strategies and offerings, carriers such as Sprint and MCI are not alone in the managed services market. Equipment vendors such as 3Com are in the mix, as are systems integrators such as IBM and Hewlett-Packard. In addition, the last few years have seen a growing crop of new providers of remote networking services, including iPass, GoRemote, FiberLink and, most recently, Toshiba.

The remote networking service providers bring to the table an ability to offer and help manage multi-mode remote access services for enterprises, including dial-up, wired Ethernet, wireless LAN and others. For many, WiMAX will be added to the menu over the next few years.

Increasingly, traditional carriers offering managed network services also will need to adjust to an enterprise environment in which access methods and services — wireline or wireless — are more fully converged with voice and data roaming capabilities.

“We know that WiMAX will be an influence and that there will be a lot of 3G activity, and the idea of managing converged networks in relation to the enterprise is on our roadmap,” said MCI's DeMerlis.

Sprint's Wyatt added that Sprint will look to enterprise IT teams for cues as to when it should start to consider more converged offerings. “Right now, the same people manage wireline and wireless service in the enterprise, but, for the most part, they are not bundled because there are different decision-makers in the enterprise working on these,” he said. “As IT shops change and converge their patterns, you might begin to see some differences in how we converge our own offerings.”