Forget about frame relay, ATM and Internet services all being housed in different organisations at AT&T.
As part of a wide-ranging reorganisation, AT&T chairman Michael Armstrong this week tapped two executives to head up a newly converged business unit handling all the company's enterprise networking services.
The move occurred at a conference for investment analysts in New York at which Armstrong and his deputies talked up AT&T's prospects and created a slight opening for competitors to get in on AT&T's cable Internet buildout.
Rick Roscitt, currently president of AT&T Solutions -- the company's outsourcing and managed network unit -- will become president of AT&T Business Services and head the company's entire voice and data enterprise networking effort.
Kathleen Earley, currently president of AT&T Internet Services, will add the frame relay, ATM and private line portfolio as the new president of AT&T Data and Internet Services. Earley will report to Roscitt, who in turn will report to Armstrong.
Roscitt and Earley promise new integration between traditional and Internet-based offerings. For example, they touted AT&T's recently introduced IP-Enabled Frame Relay -- a service that uses IP addressing rather than frame relay routing tables and multiple permanent virtual circuits to achieve any-to-any connectivity in a corporate network. "And we're going to catapult ourselves into the Web-hosting business," Earley says.
