The association with virtual private networks, VPNs, is deliberate, and indeed, VPN is the technology that will be used to deliver the secure connection to applications from outside the corporate LAN. Virtual Personal Network encompasses more than VPN services, however, in that BT will be contractually guaranteeing application performance in terms of latency, jitter and so on, eventually even on third-party infrastructure, said Huw Watkins, head of IP services marketing at Global Services.
The marketing term was coined to get corporate customers thinking about what they need to provide to remote and traveling employees, and what BT wants to deliver in terms of an end-to-end service with SLAs on application performance. This is the thrust of the Application Centric VPN offering unveiled by BT’s Infonet division in April, and is also the spirit of BT’s own Application Assured Infrastructure offering.
US-based Infonet was acquired by BT last November to beef up its global presence, and the two companies’ global networks, both of which are MPLS-based, are in the process of being merged, along with that of Radianz, which provides connectivity to the financial services industry and was acquired in March.
The primary rationale there was not the additional infrastructure (Radianz is still on a largely Frame Relay network) but rather the customer base and the kind of services provided. Reuters was its previous owner and Radianz provided access to its Factiva business information service, as well as from rivals Bloomberg and Thomson Financial. Content delivery networking is clearly an area of value-added activity BT wants to get into.
Watkins said one of the challenges in merging AAI and ACVPN had been in the different architectures adopted. We went for a centralized structure, pulling all the information about app performance back into a central database and analyzing it there, whereas Infonet put a lot of the intelligence at the edge of their network, he said.
Integration goes ahead, however, and the first product to emerge from what BY calls the harmonization process of the two portfolios will be Global Services re-launches Infonet’s MobileXpress connectivity offering. This will be a combination of the original MobileXpress, which focused on WiFi connectivity and had some 15,000 hotspots signed up to take part in the service, with BT’s own DSL-based remote access offering, all presented with a common user interface, regardless of where the user is connecting from. It also enables corporate travelers to pay on a regular monthly bill rather than have to pay for individual data sessions in the hotspots.
Beyond that, said Watkins, Global Services plans to pull together all its firewall, anti-virus, anti-spam, and ID management offerings into a single security message either late this year or early next. There will also be an extension of the firewall service. Today we manage CPE kit, but by then we’ll also offer network firewalls, he said.
A third stage within the Virtual Personal Network portfolio of offerings will see BT get more heavily into the video conferencing and business TV markets. In the UK, this will be facilitated by the bandwidth and end-to-end IP capability of the 21st Century Network that BT’s Wholesale division is installing between now and 2008. In the rest of the world, it will be delivered over the merged MPLS network now being created. We’re already writing the single service description for our MPLS network emerging from the integration of the Infonet and Radianz networks into ours, said Watkins.
