Esat BT has signalled its intent to reach further into the heart of organisational IT strategy with the launch of an enhanced managed service offering that promises to improve customer performance and maximise investment.
The Applications Assured Infrastructure (AAI) is a portfolio of services for multi-site organisations struggling to gain efficiencies from their ICT networks. “Businesses need a better understanding of the relationship between applications and the infrastructure they run over,” said Emer Kennedy, head of global products. BT research revealed that 83pc of IT professional didn’t know what applications were running on their networks.
Kennedy said that BT had been offering the methodology to some European clients on a bespoke basis but were now rolling it out to the wider marker as a standardised offering.
The AAI toolset has five components available as standalone services or part of a progressive implementation: a detailed infrastructure audit, advice on optimisation, ongoing monitoring, subsequent management of problems arising and a contractual assurance scheme covering everything from desktop to data centre or just the elements that Esat BT supplies and manages.
BT used research from Gartner to highlight its growing prowess as a global carrier that has leveraged the convergence of technologies to gain a foothold in the IT infrastructure market.
Irish CEO Bill Murphy summed it up: “I don’t know if we’d thought enough in the past about what our customers are doing with their networks. The network is the core of the ICT spend — Esat BT want to play a part in it.”
Gary Cobain, solutions director, talked of the evolution from the PC to the server and now to the network. The foundation for the new infrastructure was IP, according to Cobain, where voice becomes one of many applications. “Convergence is not just about voice-over IP, it’s about multimedia services, 24/7 access through different tools,” he said. “AAI will allow them to deploy new services and applications with confidence.”
By Ian Campbell
