Looking for ownership answers

The constant struggle for customer ownership was evident at Supercomm as service providers and vendors launched initiatives and services aimed at reeling in more customers without making radical changes to network design or equipment. For most, that means offering more outsourced services to help ease customers' burdens. Others find the immediacy of partnership and interoperability agreements to be the fastest way to make customers feel more secure.

With constant encroachment on its customer base from large and small competitors, BellSouth is trying to lure more business and ISP customers and keep its base by adding services that enable customers to rid themselves of communications headaches. The incumbent last week revealed it will offer remote access service, extend its managed virtual private network services and beef up its frame relay service to include "intelligent" private virtual circuits.

"We are trying to build our infrastructure to enable e-business," said Gregory Smith, team leader for remote access service at BellSouth. "We are just trying to build on our strengths and change as our customers' needs change."

With BellSouth's remote access service, it will house modem pools of businesses and providers such as ISPs within BellSouth central offices (COs). By housing the modems at the COs, customers theoretically can turn day-to-day management and maintenance over to BellSouth.

"The ISPs are probably our biggest opportunity for this service, but the enterprise market is key, too," Smith said, noting colleges, universities and state governments are also hot spots.

As with many outsourcing offerings, partnering with other companies brings them to market quickly. Lucent Technologies, which has been strongly focusing on its NetworkCare professional services offering, last week revealed its alliance with EMC, IBM and Sun Microsystems to target "CyberCarriers." CyberCarriers provide networking and data center services.

The partners will develop software, server, storage and networking products for use in the CyberCarrier reference architecture.

Vendors such as Advanced Fibre Communications also recognize the key role partnerships and interoperability play in the success of products and technologies, said John Schofield, president and CEO of AFC. Last week, AFC teamed with Centillium Communications, Efficient Networks and Redback Networks to launch the Universal Broadband Initiative to foster broadband market awareness.

"There has to be a commitment [on everyone's part] to reach as many customers as possible," Schofield said, noting that entails teaching providers there are technologies capable of reaching out further to customers.

The DSL Forum agrees with this theory to achieve mass-market penetration. At the show, the Forum demonstrated any-to-any interoperability among 40 different DSL equipment vendors.

"Interoperability is one of the key elements to achieving mass market deployment of DSL," said Hans-Erhard Reiter, chairman of the DSL Forum. "The technology has to be demystified in order to achieve mass-market penetration."

"Interoperability really is key if we want to raise awareness about DSL," said Jan Hester, vice president of DSL for BellSouth. "Expanding the market with standards only broadens the choices for customers."

The more choices customers have from getting DSL services to outsourcing access needs, the stronger the provider will become, BellSouth's Smith said.