BellSouth Turns Over Management Of Hosting Business To IBM

IBM will now manage about 100 customers housed in BellSouth's e-business hosting centers in Atlanta and Miami.

The companies are also jointly marketing IBM's e-business hosting services to small and mid-size business in the Southeastern United States, and BellSouth network solutions including dedicated Internet access, metro Ethernet services and network VPN and DSL.

The duo is also mulling joint product development in such areas as storage, voice applications, broadband services, homeland security and wireless.

Mike Maas, IBM's vice president of global marketing for the communications sector, said the hosting portion of the deal is just a stepping stone to a larger services strategy.

"This is really only a piece of our on-demand strategy, to be able to give increasing levels of services and capabilities through BellSouth's network," Maas said. "It's all about giving businesses dynamic access to services--from storage to computing capacity--as they need it."