RBOC BellSouth adds wireless to its infrastructure

BellSouth today announced it will integrate Air2Web’s wireless platform into its e-Platform Web hosting infrastructure to market and deliver wireless data solutions as part of its core network.

While Cingular Wireless--BellSouth owns 40% of the wireless carrier--is not central to the announcement, BellSouth expects to jointly develop solutions with Cingular in the future. Although the alliance could be leveraged to other wireless carriers outside of Cingular, BellSouth maintains it is focused on just Cingular at this point.

“We are moving down the road of being able to provide infrastructure that supports businesses that demand more than telephone lines and the Internet,” said Alan Clark, director of product management for wireless products for BellSouth. “It has to be a combination of communication methods.”

By hosting Air2Web’s mobile Internet platform in its e-business centers, BellSouth becomes both a Web-hosting company and network provider.

“It is unique for an RBOC, but it also is unique for telecom period because this is marrying web content with mobile data,” said Jeanne Schaaf, senior analyst with Forrester Research. “If you look around the industry, I am not aware of a Web hosting company that provides this capability to their customers--to take data typically delivered to a landline PC and deliver that data wirelessly.

“Usually, it is just companies like Air2Web that sell directly to enterprise customers. We don’t typically see the role of middleman like BellSouth to give customers the option to do it both ways.”

At this point, AT&T and Sprint--both of which have wireless capability--are not uniting the wireless capability with a Web hosting platform.

BellSouth’s strategy began about a year-and-a-half ago, when it began setting up its Web-hosting centers as part of its e-business strategy, Clark said. The RBOC now has about 200 centers.

“Both the IT and network environment are becoming more homogenous--Internet, wireline and wireless. We want to position ourselves to be able to support everything,” Clark said.

BellSouth has identified the Air2Web wireless platform as a way to extend the data it already is hosting for its enterprise customers. The platform is a software environment that will be installed at BellSouth’s e-business centers to allow mobile workers or consumers to access corporate applications and other Web-based content via any wireless data device, across any network or any carrier. Air2Web already has established relationships with wireless carriers.

Central to Air2Web’s strategy and value to enterprises is the fact that it manages the complexities at the network layer. In addition, because many enterprises do business with multiple wireless carriers, the company has established relationships and connectivity into all of the wireless networks that exist today. Air2Web manages and optimizes the Web content to make sure it is right for whichever device and network a customer uses.

“If an enterprise supports the stuff people already carry, then there’s no expectation that that enterprise would have to provide the devices themselves. This might happen if an enterprise enables only one type of device for data,” said Kathy Jaques, vice president of marketing at Air2Web.

Beyond its alliance with Air2Web, Bellsouth has made an equity investment in the company and has a position on its board of directors. Both companies intend to co-market and co-brand the wireless data solutions to existing business customers as well as new ones, which fall within the BellSouth nine-state region.

While this alliance will benefit BellSouth domestically, the company claims to be in discussions with all BellSouth companies around the world.

“BellSouth has a huge population of residential and small business customers and less traction with multinational companies, because it is regionally based,” Schaaf said. “That aside, on the Web-hosting front, over last year, many standalone Web-hosting companies have been bought up or have fallen out of the market. As a result, the hosting market largely has fallen into the laps of telcos.”