AT&T and IPsoft have collaborated in the Managed Services space for more than five years. The relationship began when AT&T leveraged IPsoft’s advanced capabilities as a point solution to meet specific customer requirements for their largest (signature) customers in the enterprise space. For these customers, highly customized requirements required:

• Advanced capabilities from a technology perspective which weren’t available in the standardized offerings
• An expanded geographic footprint outside the standard markets served by AT&T
• A requirement to serve customers with increasingly complex networks and support requirements
• Consistent services internationally with consolidated framework for support and service delivery.
• A need to extend the perimeter of the WAN and managed services into customer premises on a global basis.

IPsoft has grown the relationship to become a strategic partner of AT&T's custom solutions group and an important part of their ongoing efforts internationally. In the past two years, AT&T and IPsoft have expanded the relationship to include AT&T-branded Go To Market managed services powered by IPsoft. AT&T was driven to this approach by several key factors:

• Increasing time-to-market pressures for new/emerging technologies including Acceleration, Unified Communications, Datacenter and Mobility offerings
• Need for greater flexibility in developing managed services offers both around deployment scenarios, CPE and services.
• Capital funding constraints for building new offers in-house
• Customer-driven demand for greater complexity in managed solutions

AT&T’s choice in selecting IPsoft as the preferred partner for “standard” products was based on IPsoft’s:

• Ability to rapidly assimilate new technologies and develop management solutions
• Flexibility in building adaptive, integrated service models
• Unique automation capabilities, driving down operating costs and thus enabling margin efficiencies for partner offers
• Enhanced abilities to tightly integrate with carrier systems for eBonding.

The first “official” IPsoft-powered AT&T Managed Service was built around Managed WAN Acceleration and launched officially in November 2008. AT&T and IPsoft have since collaborated to develop additional standard products, including Managed Unified Communications (UC/IPT, Contact Center), Dual-Mode Mobile Voice, LAN and WLAN, and Enterprise network services. AT&T also continues to use IPsoft as a preferred global solutions partner for a broad range of custom/one-off outsourcing solutions.