By Nick Patience
Frontier Corp’s Frontier Communications unit is creating a set of IP-based applications, including email, messaging, calendar, scheduling, voice, fax and others in an outsourcing product it is calling applications networking services. It says it will develop some of them internally and partner for the rest, but they will all be based on its IP service controller hardware and service platform, which is currently in beta.
It signals a move towards the business ISP space, but Paul Santinelli, the company’s VP technology says the company has no intention of becoming an application service provider just yet, deploying ERP and other enterprise applications. It is concentrating on the core messaging and related tools to begin with – utility applications – running on its own Optronics OC- 48 backbone, he says.
Frontier says it has lined up one enterprise hardware vendor and one enterprise software vendor, but Santinelli wouldn’t name names. They will deploy the messaging technology, which will be the first application available, arriving in the fourth quarter. He says the software vendor has deployed messaging systems up to 10 million seats at a time and currently hosts about 64 million mailboxes. It is possible that it could be AT&T Corp’s WorldNet service in combination with the IBM Global Network, which it is in the final phases of acquiring. MCI Worldcom Inc’s UUNet division hosts more than twice that number of mailboxes. A trial of a voice-over-IP system will begin in the third quarter of this year, though no vendor has been chosen for that yet.
In the first quarter of next year Frontier will start rolling out collaboration, calendaring, and scheduling applications. Frontier is in the process of being acquired by Global Crossing Ltd in an $11.2bn deal that was announced in mid-March. Frontier is best known for hosting many of the web sites with the highest-traffic at its numerous media distribution centers – the name it gives to its data centers – across the US. It plans to open another two such centers this year to add to the two it opened earlier this year and between six and eight next year, but that could change after the Global Crossing acquisition has been completed.
