AT&T and Oracle sign managed hosting, outsourcing contract with Michael Baker Corporation: companies deliver collaborative business application solution for leading engineering and energy firm.

AT&T and Oracle Corporation have announced a three-year, multi-million dollar managed hosting and application management outsourcing contract with Michael Baker Corporation, an engineering and energy management firm.

AT&T and Oracle will combine their expertise to e-enable the Pittsburgh-based company's financial, accounting, sales, contracts and project management applications. The two companies will also integrate Baker's 30 offices worldwide into one networked operation, facilitating collaboration with teams of experts selected from any of these offices.

Oracle will manage Baker's applications with its E-Business Suite Outsourcing services; AT&T will provide managed hosting services from one of its Internet Data Centers that support 24x7 monitoring and maintenance and includes performance-based Service Level Agreements (SLAs).

The AT&T-Oracle solution enables Baker to achieve a more predictable Information Technology (IT) management, budgeting and cost structure, as well as receive better and faster service for its applications and IT infrastructure. This frees its IT staff to form customer-focused teams that can tackle more complex and profitable engineering and energy projects around the globe.

"Our customers demand more value from the services we provide, requiring us to communicate, integrate and manage projects of increasing complexity," said Davidson Scott, Architecture and Infrastructure Director, Michael Baker Corporation. "AT&T and Oracle allow us to focus our collaborative engineering/energy efforts on what we do best: providing our customers increased value in their relationship with us. At the same time, we're benefiting from what the two companies do best: world-class managed hosting services and application solutions."

Central to delivering the technology innovations to Baker is AT&T's integrated Global Enterprise Management System (iGEMS), a $200 million-plus management platform originally conceived and developed by AT&T Labs. Through iGEMS, AT&T monitors the performance of the infrastructure and hosting environment to predict and prevent the majority of problems before they occur.

In addition, Baker's IT professionals can view how well AT&T is performing against the SLAs through the award-winning AT&T Managed Services Portal, which is part of the unified AT&T BusinessDirect portal for business customers.

The portal provides customers with personalized, secure access to detailed information about their AT&T-hosted infrastructure and applications. Customers also can access comprehensive real-time reports with integrated SLA data, collaboration tools and electronic customer service tools, including trouble tickets and electronic billing.

"As enterprise applications become more and more complex, customers like Baker are turning to AT&T for applications management, monitoring and hosting support," said Chris Rooney, president of AT&T Business Sales. "By teaming with Oracle, we're able to deliver unsurpassed service, all with a single point of contact and fully integrated SLAs."

Baker joins a growing number of customers who are choosing to have their Oracle software delivered as an outsourced service, rather than implement and manage it themselves. The reasons for the shift to purchasing software as a service include better service, faster implementation times, predictable monthly fees, demonstrably lower IT costs and the peace of mind that stems from the delivery of continuous online management and support by Oracle experts.

"Customers are finding that the cost to manage their software can be as much as two to four times more than the initial purchase price of the software," said Timothy Chou, president, Oracle Outsourcing. "Oracle Outsourcing can help lower IT costs for customers like Baker because, as the software developer, we provide better service around software management issues, including availability, performance, security and problem and change management. By relying on the combined technology expertise of Oracle and AT&T, Baker is free to focus on their core business of energy management and engineering."