Free Newsletter

AT&T plans to beef up business offerings

April 7, 2010 — 12:52pm ET | By Caron Carlson

Tools

Tags
unified communications
AT&T
Enterprise Applications
TelePresence

AT&T unveiled a long list of projects, worth about $1 billion, to upgrade its business offerings this year, including enterprise applications, mobility services and cloud services. Many of the planned improvements, such as increased connectivity speeds in 22 states and beefed-up WiFi and 4G (LTE) services, target small businesses.

The carrier also plans to invest in new applications developed for specific verticals, including manufacturing, healthcare, finance, retail, education and government. Cutting-edge applications, such as machine-to-machine communications and location awareness, aim to give the company a stronger foothold in particular industries. Much of this spending is related to electronic health record and smart-grid initiatives--areas where AT&T stands to earn a piece of the federal stimulus spending pie.

Existing offerings in managed hosting, security, unified communications, cloud services and telepresence are also slated for improvement. AT&T wants to extend its global network to more areas around the globe, making it easier for companies to forgo travel in favor of teleconferences.

"IP-based solutions and applications have become ever more important to companies aiming to take their productivity to a new level while transforming their operations to adapt to their customers' changing needs," Ron Spears, president and CEO of AT&T Business Solutions, said in a press release.

This week's announcement out of AT&T mirrors one from about a year ago. In February 2009, the company said it would spend $1 billion on global network build-out, new business applications, telepresence, hosting and mobility, among other things.

For more:
- see AT&T's announcement
- see AT&T's 2009 announcement