Business Technology Roundtable

I'm going to pull a Paul Harvey on my colleague Joe Panettieri. He wrote a couple of weeks ago about the managed service offerings of companies such as Verizon and Cablevision. For those readers outside the U.S. who don't know radio commentator Harvey, one of his catchphrases is to talk about "the rest of the story." In this case, it's the number of global enterprises who are signing deals with carriers to manage their networks. Since the time of Joe's story, there have been at least five announcements by major U.S. or global entities opting for large managed services contracts -- and those represent only the customers who were willing to announce the deals. The first deal to catch my eye was Indianapolis Power & Light's three-year contract with AT&T for integrated network solutions between multiple offices and generation plants, announced November 24th. Now, managing a network in central Indiana may not seem earth-shaking, but IPL is a subsidia...