Qwest business unit to help enterprises migrate to IP

Qwest Communications today announced Qwest Solutions, a business unit built from six existing business areas within the carrier that will build, design and manage solutions for enterprises that want to migrate from legacy communications systems to IP and Web-based systems.

The business areas that have coalesced into Qwest Solutions include business applications, computing solutions, contact center, enterprise networking, security, and telephone and convergence. The goal is to drive a set of end-to-end solutions from a single point of contact, said Jean Becker, president of Qwest Solutions.

Becker said Qwest decided about a year ago it wanted to achieve deeper penetration into the enterprise space and concluded that the best way to go about it was to develop a suite of solutions that would take the customer through every stage of the migration process: design, build and run.

“We wanted to go beyond basic transport. We no longer wanted to be a commodity. We wanted a long-term relationship,” said Becker. She added that such an opportunity exists because most enterprises lack the capability to handle the migration on their own and because current economic conditions demand they focus on their core competencies.

“There’s been a lot of hype regarding the convergence to IP networks, and everyone wants to get there,” Becker said. “But if you’re not a communications company, you’re probably not going to have the expertise needed to get it done.”

Becker said Qwest has had the expertise for a while—the carrier has a sizable IP backbone and a good reputation in the enterprise space, she said—but needed time after the U S West merger to figure out exactly what it had and how to integrate it. “We’ve had the piece parts for five to 10 years, but never pulled it together,” Becker said.

In addition, new capabilities have been added since the merger, such as the Web Contact Center, a Web-driven platform that routes and processes voice applications, enabling businesses to significantly reduce operational costs and improve the customer experience, which was unveiled last August.

Now that Qwest Solutions has pulled it all together, it won’t rely solely on its own capabilities. It will bring in solutions as needed from outside vendors and providers to present to its enterprise customers “best of breed” solutions, said Becker. For example, Qwest Solutions today announced a multi-year agreement with Nortel Networks through which Nortel will provide products and solutions from its voice over IP, metro optical and “intelligent Internet” portfolios.

“Everything is very open and flexible,” Becker said. “A lot of our ability to deliver scale and scope will be due to our partnerships and alliances with others.”

However, Becker stressed that all of this will appear seamless to the customer. As part of the initiative, Qwest Solutions created a customer interface, Third Party Customer Agency, that will act as the customer’s single-point of contact.

In other news, Qwest also announced today a broadband access aggregation service that consolidates customers’ Internet traffic from various DSL providers onto Qwest’s network. MSN is the first customer to use the service. MSN will deliver broadband Internet access service nationwide by using the Qwest network to carry a portion of the Internet traffic generated by its growing DSL customer base in the U.S.

According to a Qwest spokeswoman, the carrier will market the service to other ISPs in the hopes of bringing additional out-of-region traffic onto Qwest’s long-haul network.

Also, Qwest today announced that the Arizona Public Utility Commission had approved the last of the items for the 14-point checklist the carrier needed to complete as a prerequisite for filing an application with the FCC to provide in-region long distance service under Section 271 of the Telecom Act. Qwest said it intends to file that application “within the next few weeks.” It would be Qwest’s first 271 application. The carrier is still in the process of completing its multi-state test of its OSS systems for the remaining 13 states in its region.