SCIENCE

Global Crossing has announced that Frost & Sullivan has named Global Crossing the recipient of the 2010 North American Competitive Strategy Leadership of the Year Award for best practices in the MPLS/IP VPN Services Market.

The criteria for the Competitive Strategy Leadership of the Year Award include an assessment of Global Crossing's performance against key competitors in areas such as strategic execution, market position, growth in market share, brand strength, and levels of customer satisfaction and customer value.

"We are proud that Frost & Sullivan has recognized us for those attributes that differentiate Global Crossing in the marketplace, namely our global reach, our product portfolio and our customer experience," said Dave Carey, chief marketing officer for Global Crossing.  "Our high-performance, fully meshed global MPLS network is among the world's most reliable, and positions us as a leading provider of converged IP services for enterprise and carrier customers."

The U.S. MPLS VPN services sector is in the growth stage of its product lifecycle, with demand for the service increasing across vertical markets.  Frost & Sullivan research shows that revenue for these services exceeded $5.5 Billion in 2009, and the firm expects double-digit growth rates throughout the forecast period.

"Continuous enterprise focus on convergence is the single most important driver fueling adoption of MPLS VPNs," said Roopashree Honnachari, senior industry analyst at Frost & Sullivan.  "As the industry's first global carrier to deploy a global MPLS network, Global Crossing has developed a highly competitive MPLS IP VPN service offering and has successfully increased its market share as enterprises increasingly turn to Global Crossing as an alternative to their incumbent provider."

Frost & Sullivan's assessment of Global Crossing highlighted a few key areas of distinction.

For instance, the Best Practices report states that Global Crossing continuously strives to improve its Classes of Service and Service Level Agreements (SLAs) for its MPLS offering, resulting "in Global Crossing being consistently ranked high in customer satisfaction."

In fact, according to KS&R, the independent market research firm that produces Global Crossing's quarterly customer satisfaction surveys, 98 percent of Global Crossing customers were "satisfied" with Global Crossing in the third quarter of 2010, while 78 percent of customers said they were "very satisfied" during the same period.  In addition, 79 percent of Global Crossing customers said that they were "very likely" to recommend Global Crossing.  Global Crossing also has an advantage over its competitors in six customer satisfaction categories: overall satisfaction, account team support, customer service center, service activity support, billing support and overall value.

Global Crossing also is rated "World Class" for International Data VPN based upon results from a customer satisfaction study conducted by Telemark Services earlier this year.

The Frost & Sullivan report also highlighted Global Crossing's ability to monitor its MPLS backbone, citing "the private IP transport is backed by industry-leading SLAs and comes with an impressive set of network performance (Network Integrity) and application (Application Integrity) monitoring tools that can be controlled using the uCommand customer portal."

uCommand is Global Crossing's online account management tool that gives customers access to network management and services, and the ability to self-provision voice services.  The company recently added new features, such as real-time performance monitoring and network management capabilities that provide the ability to interact with a complete customer inventory.  In addition, customers can manage network alarms and interact with service delivery and assurance teams through a customized graphical map interface that provides circuit-by-circuit location-specific detail.

The Frost & Sullivan report's positive assessment of Global Crossing's strategic execution is predicated on the company's disciplined business strategy and focus on the multinational enterprise market.

The report highlights Global Crossing's suite of converged IP services, including IP VPN, EtherSphere global Ethernet wide area networks, Voice over IP (VoIP), Dedicated Internet Access and IP Transport, Remote VPN Access, Mobile IP Connect and Ready Access voice, Data Center solutions, and Web and video collaboration tools.  Global Crossing continually enhances its offerings and has a rigorous timetable for expanding availability to more locations around the globe.  The company recently announced its expansion across Eastern Europe with the addition of IP points of presence in Sofia, Bulgaria; Bratislava, Slovakia, and Bucharest, Romania.