BT Group PLC is focused on services for data centers. "We will move from our strength in global networking to the IT space," says CTO Matt Bross. "We will do everything from infrastructure build-up through determining the compute and storage cycles." BT plans to offer managed security services and managed access to enterprise applications through the application layer. "If [users] are running a Siebel system, we will ensure the application [performance] end to end as opposed to just connecting it," Bross says.

"We can take pieces of what the data center does and do that in a cost-effective way," says Stu Elby, vice president of network architecture and enterprise technologies at Verizon Communications. Elby says business continuity and managed security services are "in the works."

The paradigm of selling business-level services over the network is powerful, says Brian Carpenter, chairman of the Internet Engineering Task Force and a distinguished engineer at IBM. But carriers also face competition from companies ranging from upstarts like Salesforce.com Inc. to established operations like IBM Global Services. "It will be interesting to see whether the traditional telcos can match that sort of model," Carpenter says.

Users may be receptive to at least some of these services, particularly as the corporate workforce becomes more distributed. "The carrier is in a position to provide more and more of the computer telephony or mobile options that aren't available off-premise, which is where much of the work is going," says Alan Ballinger, senior manager, distributed network integration and network services at Boeing.

Doug Hill, associate technical fellow and network chief architect at Boeing, sees a role for carriers in authentication and security services. "At some point, we'll have to have a greater ability for federation or have our authentication services federate into other companies or governments," he says. Carriers are well positioned to eventually deliver those services, and although they are less important for Boeing, "the carriers are going to have to play a role in that because everyone can't afford to build their own private network," Hill says. "It has to be more of an Internet model."