Marketing in Europe: A perspective from the Netherlands

Telemarketing & Call Center Solutions, Jan 1996 by Tehrani, Nadji

To develop the potential market Europe presents, PTT Telecom announced a joint venture with Sweden's Telia on October 8, 1991. It was created by merging the national and international data and satellite communications operations of the two companies. Unified management began on January 1, 1993 and assets were merged on April 1, 1993. Swiss Telecom PTT joined in August 1993 and Telefonica (Spain's PTT) joined in mid-1994.

The purposes behind creating Unisource were to defend the home markets, replace lost marketshare in the home markets due to competition with international revenues, and to provide international revenues, and to provide international capabilities at a shared cost. Unisource offers users the following services:

*Packet switched services use the international X.25 standard, providing a uniform global service with access to more than 200 other X.25 networks around the world. The service can also be used to interconnect local networks, forming one large corporate network.

*SNA/SDLC services for data communications in IBM environments.

*LAN interconnect services to provide cost-effective communications between local area networks. By using this service, an integrated network is created and monitored.

*Frame relay services for interconnecting hosts and networks, especially for data-intensive, bursty applications such as LAN-to-LAN inter-networking.

*Managed bandwidth services, an advanced platform, for the building of tailor-made pan-European and global communications solutions as an alternative to private internal networks to leased-line solutions.

*Messaging services offer supporting services within the areas of corporate and external messaging as well as within electronic commerce.

*Outsourcing services provide for the management of the customer's network assets, from both the financial and operational points of view.

*Satellite services provide access to Eastern Europe for voice and data services and specialist services for satellite broadcasting.

*Voice services provide an alternative to international private voice networks.

In the early spring of 1994, Unisource formed a contractual relationship with AT&T to team up for the provision of closed-user-group voice services to European Virtual Private Network Users Association (EVUA), a group of approximately 40 European multinational companies. Later that year, Unisource joined WorldPartners. WorldPartners, formed in May 1993, is an association of telecommunications carriers that have joined together to provide the family of WorldSource(SM) global services that include virtual network services for voice and data communications, highly reliable private line services for data and voice, and frame relay services for high-speed data transmission. Member companies include AT&T, KDD of Japan, Singapore Telecom, Telecom New Zealand International, Telstra of Australia, Hong Kong Telecom, Unitel of Canada and Korea Telecom. The venture will be the distributor for WorldSource Services(SM) in Europe.

At the end of 1994, Unisource and AT&T announced their intentions to create Uniworld, a joint venture 60 percent owned by Unisource and 40 percent by AT&T. Mr. John Foster, the COO of Uniworld, explained that the purpose of the organization is to provide voice, data, messaging, and satellite as a world source, while defending the home market and adding new revenue. It will address the problem of how a company gains scope -- and how to go global. Mr. Foster sees room for maybe three or four major vendors in Europe. At Unisource, he continued, "We are very active in marketing, and very conscious of the European telemarketing laws. We have a good backlog already internationally." While Unisource can provide service anywhere in Europe, it has a global perspective.