David Molony

AT&T's global networking teams pipped Verizon Business and other global telecoms services rivals by clocking most new corporate networking contracts in the first six months of 2007.

AT&T announced 12 global services deals; Verizon Business one fewer. They were followed by BT Global Services on 10 and T-Systems International with nine. VNO Vanco announced eight deals in the first half.

Comment:

In London the saying goes: You wait an hour for a bus, then three come along at once. Perhaps we could have an equivalent in global telecoms services.

Operators are famously reluctant to talk about their big deals - although it would be fairer to say that it's their customers who are reluctant to talk about global networking deals, for competitive reasons - but our persistent enquiries for more information seem to have paid off.

When we showed initial research to AT&T, and wondered why they had so few contracts to report compared with a year earlier, we were told they were being saved for the second half. And so they were: six contracts for international services were announced in July alone.

Last month, AT&T revealed a series of international deals: global VPN for engineering technology supplier Metso; IP VPN to 79 sites worldwide for fluid controls systems maker Norgren; IP networking for agribusiness operator JR Simplot; global MPLS network for contact centre manager Alorica Inc; global IP VPN for consumer packaging producer Rexam; and voice services for weight management specialist Jenny Craig Inc.

These deals are typical of the global networking business that the world's operators are doing; each running for three years and worth between $3-10m.

They are also typical of the deals we monitored for the big seven service providers (AT&T, BT, Cable & Wireless, NTT Com, Orange Business Services, T-Systems and Verizon) in our first half survey, for other reasons.

There are still few signs of deals including managed IT and applications as a significant part of the overall managed services deal. The biggest value deals are still for global connectivity.

One operator's applications performance management contract was worth less than $250,000 over three years.

If it is advanced services you are looking for; you will find those in domestic enterprise contracts. In three separate national networking contracts signed in July, AT&T is providing data applications prioritization, managed Internet services and secure email. These are things multinationals still seem reluctant to contract for under global arrangements.

For more analysis and full tables of deals by global telecoms and IT services providers, see 'Global services contracts: a three-way value split' (30 July) in IP-Enterprise@Ovum.