Europeans plan their IT overhaul >BY John Williamson, International Editor

As the deadline looms for the substantial liberalization of their public switched network monopolies, European telcos are scrambling to install North American information technology systems to improve everything from customer care to the speed of line provisioning.

The most recent deal, announced last week, involves the supply of GTE's usage management and customer billing systems-along with the Cobra customer care service platform developed by Bell Sygma of Canada-to Portugal Telecom.

Valued at $87 million over a three-year period, the new systems will be used in Portugal Telecom's Clientes Primeiro (CLIP) initiative. CLIP is designed to enable the telco to offer high-quality customer services, enhance its ability to interact with customers and overhaul its record-keeping procedures.

Following the completion of design work, a CLIP pilot will kick off in March 1998, and an integrated system is scheduled to be operational by 1999.

Much closer to implementation is a new customer service capability being installed by Germany's Deutsche Telekom, following a deal inked with Sybase for middleware technology and Hewlett-Packard for Unix hardware. The systems will be used to build a true on-line customer sales service that, in turn, will form the basis for other new customer-specific products. Up to now, customer service personnel have had to use different emulation screens to access information from different database systems, depending on the type of information requested and where it is stored.