BUSINESS STRATEGY

Business Strategy

Business Strategy

Company background

AT&T prides itself on its long history of providing communications services and products of the highest quality at competitive prices. AT&T Corporation (American Telephone and Telegraph) is a telecommunication company based in U.S. During its long history, AT&T has been, at times the largest telephone company in the world. The company provides audio, video, data and Internet for businesses, customers and government agencies. Their vision statement is self-explanatory, “Our Vision at AT&T - connect people with their world, everywhere they live and work, and do it better than anyone else. (AT&T Company Information) (AT&T Company Information)” Constant focus on innovation and mobility has positioned AT&T as a global leader in wire line, wireless and data services (Hafner, 2007, 1). It also has less known segments such as YP.com, the Yellow Pages search engine. In the U.S' market alone, AT&T boasts a market share of 92.8 million wireless subscribers and 17.46 million total broadband connections.

Present Situation

Recently, AT&T ventured to add a high-quality managed services offering focused on tele-presence and unique business-to-business connectivity to its Application Solutions suite of services. To facilitate that effort, AT&T engaged with the Cisco® Internet Business Solutions Group (IBSG) to help develop a unique go-to-market strategy for offering Cisco Tele-Presence™ services to its global enterprise, government (including medical), education, and federal customers. Cisco Tele-Presence, combined with AT&T's Business Exchange solution, enables impressive, in-person communication and collaboration over the network with colleagues, prospects, and partners, even when they are located in opposite hemispheres. Users perceive Cisco Tele-Presence as providing a meeting environment more conducive to collaboration than standard video-conferencing technologies (Grant, 2005, 112). Cisco Tele-Presence also allows sharing of complex, data-rich content through an intuitive and high-quality experience. Cisco IBSG worked with AT&T to develop a go-to-market tele-presence managed-services strategy: analyzing market demand, identifying key industry “ecosystems” for Cisco Tele-Presence, establishing specific value propositions for each vertical industry sector, defining use cases, and analyzing the economic impact. Cisco IBSG focused on two broad challenges to scale the go-to-market effort and accelerate the process.

Organizational Audit

The functional areas of all organizations have strengths and weaknesses. No company has the same strengths or weaknesses in all areas. For example, Maytag is known for its excellent production and product design, while Procter & Gamble is known for its powerful marketing. External strengths and weaknesses, coupled with external opportunities and threats, as well as a clear statement of the mission are the basis for establishing objectives and strategies. The objectives and strategies are established in AT & T with the intent to capitalize on internal strengths and overcome weaknesses (Kincaid, 2009, 15). The process of conducting an audit is much like the process for conducting an external audit. Managers and employees representing the entire company must be involved to identify the strengths and weaknesses of the company. The internal audit required to meet and assimilate information for marketing operations management, finance / accounting, production / operations, research and development and computer information Systems ...