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IBM: Where Else Do You Go for Soup to Nuts?
If any company has the staff size to participate in an evaluation like ours, it's IBM. We're talking 130,000 consultants, 10,000 e-commerce engagements and new innovation centers popping up around the globe to address e-business, design and systems integration.

IBM declined, however, because we were asking proprietary questions. But that's a little too facile. The real reason probably has more to do with that old "we've-got-it-nailed" arrogance. If a business wants soup-to-nuts e-commerce hosting, including back-end integration, there aren't many options besides IBM. Customers can cobble something together using infant partnerships from Deloitte-Sprint, KPMG-Qwest, Ernst & Young-GTE Internetworking, or less defined or exclusive systems integration partnerships fostered by Digex and Exodus, but IBM has the kind of multiskilled experience with legacy systems that attracts conservative businesses.

Frank Bernhard, Omni Consulting Group managing partner, also points out that IBM has a sustained reputation for doing day-to-day operations well--a skill most hosting providers are just learning. That's not to say that all customers are pleased. Despite IBM's claims of agnosticism, some customers complain that its hosting services are expensive and biased in favor of IBM products. We also found that when businesses changed hosting providers among The Great Eight, they were most likely to name IBM as the service they were leaving. Reliability was often an issue.

Another concern lies with the $4-billion sale of IBM's global network to AT&T. IBM isn't saying whether it has special services worked out with AT&T, but if it doesn't, it must prove it can expeditiously and cost-effectively order bandwidth in competition with ISPs that provide hosting.

AT&T: One User's White Elephant
"There's a problem with asking an elephant to serve lunch to an ant." That's how one mid-sized business feels about using AT&T hosting. We had a similar experience. AT&T is so huge, it can be unresponsive. For weeks we worked with AT&T, asking for replies. In fact, it took us more than a week to find out where our inquiries had been routed. Then came the promises of a reply that never materialized.

The AT&T customer--the mid-sized ant requesting anonymity--thinks big companies may do well with AT&T, but giants like AT&T aren't sensitive to the needs of mid-sized or small firms. That may be an especially knotty problem if Forrester Research's Jeanne Schaaf is correct when she says most of AT&T's customer base is comprised of low-end, small, less sophisticated customers. AT&T provides network integration, but hardly any systems integration, she says. Omni's Bernhard adds that AT&T's pricing tends to be "hit-or-miss," and more attractive to smaller businesses than to enterprise customers.

Cable & Wireless: Too Much To Chew
When Cable & Wireless said its managers had too much work to do to respond to our inquiries, we believed it.

C&W has bitten off so much lately that it will take some time to chew or even think about swallowing. The company has been plagued by high-level management turnover, security fiascoes in Australia and the monumental task of absorbing MCI's Internet business.

At the same time, Bernhard says C&W has some of the best hosting prices to be found. "They are focused on taking customers at whatever cost," he notes, warning that hypoxia, and erosion in quality and value, could result.

It's not clear, however, if the current pricing regime will remain. C&W recently announced a $500-million ASP partnership to run Compaq Computer Corp. systems in C&W hosting facilities with Compaq NonStop eBusiness consulting and professional services and multilingual helpdesks. Under the agreement, C&W will expand its own networking and application management staffing for non-Compaq collocation services. The new ASP service, targeted at small- and mid-sized companies, was slated to kick off early this year in Europe, the United Kingdom and the United States.

Too bad C&W refused to tell us more, because it appears to be a well-positioned Great Eight provider when it comes to the emerging globalization of commerce.