The deal, which was originally announced in June, calls for AT&T to transfer about 1,600 domestic Japanese business customers and about 245 customer support employees to IIJI.
Regardless of the sale, AT&T plans to maintain a strong presence in Japan.
The service provider already maintains its own domestic Japanese AT&T Global Network infrastructure, which includes four global network service nodes, remote access infrastructure for corporate clients, an Internet Data Centre and significant international subsea cable capacity.
Over this infrastructure, AT&T will continue to offer multinational corporations (MNCs) its portfolio of wireline managed connectivity such as Ethernet, mobile, cloud and unified communications applications.
“Japan is an important market for AT&T, and we are focused on providing a world-class level of service to our multinational customers with a presence there,” said Bernard Yee, vice president AT&T Asia Pacific in a release
While AT&T is selling off its Japan outsourcing operations to IIJ, AT&T will continue sell IIJI products to the MNCs it serves that have Japanese operations.
In turn, IIJ will buy global connectivity services from AT&T to support its Japan-based customers’.
Selling off IIJ is just one of two major divestitures AT&T has recently completed in an effort to focus its attention on its core telecom business.
In addition to IIJ, AT&T reached a deal to sell its Sterling Commerce business to IBM (NYSE: IBM) in May.
Source:http://www.fiercetelecom.com/story/t-wraps-sale-japan-outsourcing-operations-iiji/2010-09-01
