Buoyed by recent outsourcing contract wins with Abbey National and the UK National Health Service, the 5.3bn pounds ($9.7bn) revenue network and data services operation of London, UK-based BT Group Plc unveiled a package of services which would see BT take responsibility for the performance of its clients’ business critical applications.

Andy Green, CEO of BT Global Services, said: All CIOs have had conversations with their telecoms provider, their software provider and their hardware provider when something goes wrong with their infrastructure, where each party has said that it is nothing to do with them…What we are proposing to do is operate the infrastructure from the server to the desktop across the LAN and the WAN, and get rid of these horrible conversations.

BT’s initiative seems to go against the current trend for multi-sourcing, where clients work with a number of best of breed services providers, rather than hand over more complete sections of their infrastructure to a single vendor under a far-reaching outsourcing deal.

However, Green said that BT Global Services already manages both networks and applications as a bespoke service for some unnamed clients in the UK and Asia Pacific, but now plans to industrialize it by offering a standardized menu of five services: audit, optimize, monitor, manage and assure.

As part of the audit, BT will produce a report on the client’s application, data center and network environment based on a monitoring period of between one to four months.

Based on this audit, BT will make recommendations for optimizing the client’s network and application efficiency.T’s third proposition is to monitor the client’s application performance, providing reports of the monitored data, such as traffic volumes by interval, as a hosted service. Green said that this service would typically cost a medium-sized client from 100,000 pounds ($183,000).

The fourth service is applications management, where BT offers to investigate application performance issues, and raise alarms when pre-defined thresholds such as bandwidth consumption and response times are threatened.

The fifth prong of BT’s offering is what Sally Davis, BT’s president of global products describes as the real prize. Under the assure moniker, BT aims to provide CIOs with assurance that their applications will perform in a predictable way – providing that they run on infrastructure supplied and managed by BT.

BT Global Services said that the services are primarily targeted at clients in the finance, transport, government and manufacturing sectors. Although the company will be offering a combined service level agreement (SLA) for the performance of the network and the application infrastructure, Green said that BT would not be tying itself to contracts where a significant portion of its payment is tied to it meeting these SLAs.

This article is based on material originally published by ComputerWire