WorldCom aims for ´Generation d´ business

International comms service provider WorldCom has renewed its effort to capture the communications business of the world´s corporates by presenting its technology and service as part of a new age philosophy, Generation Digital.

By bringing together the teams and products from WorldCom and its ISP subsidiary UUNet, the company aims to meet the "digital generation" needs of its customers from one source. Even though WorldCom has owned UUNet for more than four years, the IP access company was not fully integrated into the parent company. "Many of our customers bought service from WorldCom and UUNet," admitted Clive Curtis, director, consultancy development, European consultancy, corporate accounts at WorldCom.

Now the voice and traditional ATM and frame relay services provided by WorldCom and the IP access and Internet traffic services of UUNet have been brought together in a portfolio package for business users, which, according to WorldCom, are rapidly increasing their connectivity requirements.

"Many companies are now leaping from 128 Kbps straight to connections of 2 Mbps and even more," said Richard Woods, WorldCom´s senior manager, U.K. corporate communications. "There is major growth now for us in terms of upgrades to existing customers, as opposed to hooking up new customers. UUNet´s original vision was to connect the business community to the Internet. Now, 60% of the additional capacity we supply is in upgrades, and most of those are to links of more than 2 Mbps," added Woods.

Curtis is convinced that WorldCom´s target market - the world´s corporates that have more than 250 employees and significant desktop connectivity to the supply chain - "all need to use new technologies to make their business grow. The big wave is yet to come."

WorldCom has identified three major growth areas upon which it will focus much of its effort - IP virtual private networks (IP VPNs), Web hosting, and Web-enabled contact center services.

In hosting in particular, WorldCom believes it has a range of services to attract business from the corporates, from simple shared Web server hosting to high-end, co-located outsourced hosting and applications provision packages. In the more lucrative, high-end hosting services, WorldCom is to make use of the expertise that hosting specialist Digex will bring to the company. WorldCom is close to completing the acquisition of Digex parent, Intermedia Communications Inc., though this is subject to a shareholder vote on 19 June, at a meeting in Tampa, Florida.

In Europe, where it offers service in more than 20 countries, WorldCom currently has about 12,000 square metres in around 15 UUNet data centers. "In the locations where the market is mature, such as U.K. and Sweden, the centers are full," said Woods, "but we have plenty of space in the centers located in the growing [continental] European countries, where occupancy rates are up to 30%. And we are planning to add another 4,000 sq metres in Europe this year offering Digex-type services," added Woods.

And what WorldCom is keen to do is fill this space with the high-value, colocation-based services rather than the multiple, low-end simple Web-hosting services that largely populate its "full" centers.

And the company´s mobile ambitions? "To provide data hosting services to the mobile service providers and network traffic transport services to the mobile operators - our mobile opportunity is on the ground," said Curtis.

And having failed to secure a 3G license in the U.K. (WorldCom dropped out of the bidding process when the bids started creeping towards £4 billion), the company has "no plans at the moment to be an MVNO," said Curtis, though nothing could be ruled out in the future, he added.