Users Advised to Review Contracts, Consider Alternatives

Computerworld - Corporate users need to assess their contracts with network services providers and make plans for coping with the long-term consolidation of the telecommunications industry, several industry experts said last week.
"Enterprise customers need to pay more attention to regulatory processes than in the past because the competitive forces that have protected them will be weakened," said Colleen Boothby, an attorney at Levine, Blaszak, Block & Boothby LLP in Washington.
Boothby's firm tracks Federal Communications Commission procedures affecting network operators and represents large companies in contract negotiations with the carriers. It also works with a group of 19 very large corporations called the Ad Hoc Telecommunications Users Committee.
With former regional Bell operating companies (RBOC) such as SBC now entering the business long-distance market, "there are all kinds of opportunities for mischief," Boothby said. The RBOCs "don't know how to play in this market, don't have the account teams and support and are not as good on contract terms," she asserted.
Boothby said she also worries that if vendors aren't regulated closely, they "will revert back to the practices of the 1980s," when customers often were told that they could obtain new network services only if they bought telecommunications equipment from the carrier they had chosen.
Team Concerns
For now, the top concern for AT&T users is what might happen to their account teams, said Jim Blaszak, another attorney at the law firm. "Users need to gird themselves for the possibility that current teams will change and shrink," Blaszak said.
Even if a company has a contract that limits its carrier's ability to downsize the account team, employees assigned to the team could still be laid off, Boothby added. "If people are laid off, they're laid off," she said. "So, what good does the contract language do you?"
Network managers should look closer than ever at switching to alternative carriers in the U.S. and in international markets, said Gartner Inc. analyst Eric Paulak. Users also may want to evaluate the idea of hiring a systems integrator to manage all of their voice and data network services, he added.