Judy Spitz, CIO of Verizon Business, said that, in the run-up to the start of operating as a single company, her team at Verizon integrated the RBOC’s existing web services activities with those of long distance and international operator MCI.
We had a web services infrastructure for development and one for real-time transaction processing within Verizon, which had been under development since 2002, she began. At MCI they were implementing web services within individual portfolios and were actually stronger in product, with less for the development environment.
The merger of these efforts resulted in what is now called Verizon’s IT Workbench, which Spitz described as one of the largest web services infrastructures in the industry.
We inherited that from [pre-merger] Verizon and have moved onto a shared common infrastructure, which is also used by Verizon Telecom and Werizon Wireless, she went on.
The next stage, she went on, will be to turn it outward to our customers, offering them a library where they can subscribe to different web services for ordering, billing and so on.
She referred to this process as e-bonding with us, beyond EDI or proprietary messages, adding that the technology is already deployed internally, and our sales and marketing people are currently playing with it to see how well it works prior to rolling it out to our customers.
A possible name for this library is Collaboration Center, Verizon Business’s plan being to train the IT departments of corporate customers in how to use it.
If you want to pace an order with us, you’ll have three options, Spitz explained. You’ll be able to phone and talk to us directly or go to our portal and place the order, both of which will take it into our ordering system. Alternatively, you’ll be able to place the order from within your own ordering system via a web service that will push the transaction to our systems. In addition to ordering, she said her product development group is already developing a trouble management web service.
The whole collaborative capability initiative is part of the carrier’s broader strategy of focusing increasingly on multinational corporations (MNCs) with multi-country WAN requirements, a theme that is a leitmotiv in its execs’ conversations at the moment.
This means on the one hand the kind of increased automation of processes that web services enables, because some of our customers want to e-bond with us directly from within their systems, Spitz explained. It also means delivery of a consistent user experience, regardless of where the customer is physically located.
There are essentially four global players in corporate WAN connectivity, namely Verizon Business, AT&T, BTGS and Orange Business Services. The two US players have the advantage, in one sense, of a huge domestic market, whereas the Europeans have, perforce, had to think internationally. Indeed, BT bought Infonet in November 2004 to give it a transatlantic presence.
For both Verizon and AT&T, going international has tended, in the first instance, to mean serving the overseas offices of their big US MNC customers. Indeed, when asked about non-US customers, Verizon Business tends always to refer to its poster child for winning international business, namely Dutch banking group ABN Amro, which still today, four years into the deal, remains the largest IT outsourcing deal in European history, according to John Irvine, the carrier’s VP of international marketing.
Now, said Spitz, the focus is on MNCs wherever they’re based, and to this end the company has between 500 and 600 IT staffers in Europe and APAC, as well as part of the 4,500 in the US working on developing international systems.
Irvine added that, of the four big global players, Verizon Business was already the most international, with non-US business representing around 25% of its $26bn-$27bn annual revenue.
