InformationWeek

November 27, 2000

Printer ready

Sprint Invests Billions In E-Business Packages

Carrier merges two groups to provide customers with a complete menu of services

By Bob Wallace

More on Sprint:

Sprint Consolidates E-Business Units (11/13/00)

Sprint Thinks Business (11/13/00)

Send Us Your Feedback

hile other large telephone companies split into separate units, Sprint is combining two groups and investing billions of dollars to provide customers with a complete menu of E-business services from a single source. Sprint this month said it will merge its Enterprise Network Services group and its Internet Services unit to form e-Solutions, and will spend $2 billion next year on hosting, support systems, staffing, and network infrastructure to beef up e-Solutions' capabilities.

"By aligning people and resources to provide a single entity, Sprint should be knocking the time it takes to deal with multiple groups and coordinate their efforts out of the equation," says Goutham Surapeneni, chief of technical operations at Complete Business Solutions Inc., a Farmington Hills, Mich., systems integrator and Sprint customer.

E-Solutions will create E-business packages that combine basic transport, Internet access, hosting, managed services, application management and monitoring, and professional services, says Keith Paglusch, president of e-Solutions. The new unit has more than 2,000 employees and will expand its 110-person sales force to more than 200 by mid-2001.

E-Solutions will use Sprint's two current hosting centers; two more centers are due online by year's end, and seven more will be added in each of the next two years. The unit is developing next-generation support systems to offer customers integrated online ordering, trouble ticketing, and a single bill. E-Solutions will work with Sprint PCS to add wireless capabilities.

Says Carrie Lewis, an E-sourcing analyst at the Yankee Group, "Sprint's aggressive hosting center buildout is key to their success in landing customers and moving them up the ladder to higher-margin hosting and managed services packages."