SBC Communications Inc. hopes to leverage vendor partner Cisco System Inc.’s relationship with enterprise customers and market saavy in the carrier’s continued push into managed services.
The two companies today announced a new three-year strategic marketing and sales agreement.
“They’ll be joint sales activities and customer account planning” between Cisco and SBC, says John Regan, SBC’s vice president of business services for managed services. “SBC and Cisco will go to market as a partner in joint accounts.” In addition to joint marketing and sales, Cisco will help SBC decide how to vertically align applications by industry, says Regan. The companies expect to announce the first vertical applications in the next 45 to 60 days, he says, noting that the financial and government sectors are key early opportunities.
Cisco, which likes to talk about its ability to help service providers target enterprise users, has a similar deal in place with Sprint (see XCHANGE, July 2002, page 16.)
The new SBC relationship also names Cisco as the preferred provider for specific SBC managed service products, including IP telephony, network- and CPE-based IP VPNs, security, storage networking, hosting and wireless local area networks. SBC subsidiaries also plan to use Cisco optical networking, Ethernet transport and network-based IP-VPN technology in their core network infrastructure. This will enable SBC companies to accelerate development and deployment of high-speed networking solutions such as optical Ethernet and MPLS switching in 2003. An SBC company also is using Cisco 12000 Series routers within its national OC192 IP backbone network, which will be completed in 2003. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.
New managed services SBC will offer through its new relationship with Cisco incorporate network design to equipment installation to data transport services, all monitored, managed and maintained by SBC affiliates.
The first managed service offering to result from the SBC and Cisco agreement is SBC Managed IP-VPN, which is available today. Regan says this is a reintroduction of the managed IP VPN services the carrier announced May 7, 2002. SBC Managed IP-VPN is a hardware-based solution that enables VPN access to business LANs through the Internet. The new VPN offering is managed from end to end (that is, from the telecommuter's computer or other networking device to the corporate network or intranet), and also provides remote access, site-to-site and extranet services for the enterprise network. The SBC Managed IP-VPN is offered as a bundled solution in conjunction with dedicated Internet access, DSL, dial-up Internet access or full enterprise network management solutions, and can be packaged with SBC security offerings such as managed firewall and intrusion detection services.
Additionally, SBC expects to deliver managed VoIP services based on Cisco equipment no later than the first quarter of 2003, with the goal being in January. Through the VoIP managed offering, SBC will resell and maintain Cisco’s CPE-based AVVID product line, which it also can support as an IP Centrex offering, says Regan. Fully managed AVVID offerings will be introduced early in 2003. SBC already offers IP Centrex services -- including SBC Centrex IP, SBC Centrex DSL, SBC CentrexMate and SBC Centrex Custom Calling Name – based on Lucent Technologies Inc. equipment in six cities. Regan indicated SBC has no plans to curtail its IP Centrex relationship with Lucent in light of the new Cisco deal.
Other managed service offerings currently under development by SBC affiliates and Cisco, and planned for delivery in 2003 and 2004, include Ethernet optical network, which will provide businesses with flexible bandwidth options up to 1gbps for dedicated Internet access or transparent LAN services; managed security that will expand SBC’s existing security offering by bundling Cisco CPE with installation and maintenance, firewall administration and monitoring, and intrusion detection from SBC; network-based IP-VPN that will use SBC’s evolving IP backbone and MPLS capabilities; fully managed Web and storage-area network hosting that will bundle Cisco servers with customer applications hosted by an SBC affiliate in the company’s Internet data centers; support for wireless LANs. “The first phase of WLAN we see as premises-based,” says Regan. He adds that SBC will also be looking at options beyond that related to how to integrate WLANs with services from Cingular further into the future.
