MCI has begun the European rollout of a portfolio of
communications services intended to let firms extract business
advantages from their network infrastructure.
MCI Advantage is an IP-based portfolio of services designed to
help companies converge their voice and data networks. The
portfolio includes networked voice over IP and hosted IP telephony,
both of which MCI believes are intrinsically cost-efficient and can
run on an existing infrastructure.
On-net calls are free and integration of voice and data on the
same network will provide organisations with access costs
savings.
The new MCI system was launched by president and CEO Michael
Capellas, who told Computer Weekly.com that MCI would concentrate
on serving the business needs of large enterprises with four key
offerings: contact centre products (including web call centres),
security, managed services, and data hosting.
Capellas made light of the well-reported financial problems
affecting MCI and was not inclined to comment on the expected
merger with Verizon.
However, he did choose to talk about what he called MCI's
business enhancing proposition for large enterprises with global
communications needs.
Capellas drew a comparison between MCI’s decision to focus on
the large commercial enterprises with the company's competitors,
which also service SMEs and the consumer markets.
He argued that even though no one company had a silver-bullet
solution for global communications, MCI was best placed to serve
enterprises' needs and that it would leverage the reach and
presence of its global network, lighting up more fibre.
Also on the agenda for 2005 were strategic partnerships with
companies that could add to the MCI value proposition.
The first of these will be with Microsoft, where MCI will look
to develop solution based around the Microsoft Office Live
Communications Server. In the second half of this year MCI will
announce partnerships with companies in the wireless communications
arena whose products and services will likely be integrated with
the MCI global network.