Ron Spears, executive vice president of AT&T global business sales, said the work at GM to integrate its communication platform, which includes (VOIP) voice over IP, is "in process and in progress" and will take some 18 months to reach the point "where they are running effectively a complete IP infrastructure environment on a global basis."

The goal of this IP-based system is to have a consistent experience for GM workers no matter where they are located. "At its simplest level, there will be a voice mail platform that will look the same to every General Motors employee around the world," said Spears, and that is not a trivial task. Historically, "it's been a hodgepodge of systems mostly built by the regional entities, and that's true in most enterprises today," he said.

Szygenda said company engineers and support staff work as teams, and the company can't have separate telecom and management systems supporting them. "That doesn't work when you are running a real-time global company," he said. "You don't want to have any differences."

Szygenda said GM's decision to go with MPLS technology as a "good bet" for the company when it was made about four years ago, and the "next thing now is to leverage all of it" and build out the capability and manage it as one system, he said.

"The real end goal is that every employee has the same type of capabilities no matter where they are in the world," Szygenda said, "and in fact, when they wake up they don't need to know where they are in the world. It just works."