Aegis Communications Group Inc., a worldwide transaction-based business process outsourcing company, has awarded AT&T a $17 million networking services contract. The five-year agreement renews and expands a longstanding relationship between the two companies and provides Aegis and its clients the benefits of scale and cutting-edge technology.

Aegis enables clients to make customer contact programs more profitable and drive efficiency in back office processes. AT&T will provide Aegis with a network-based Internet Protocol Virtual Private Network (IP VPN) solution using Multi-Protocol Label Switching (MPLS) technology. The AT&T solution will enable Aegis to transition to Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) and connect seven of its locations with significantly increased bandwidth and faster speeds.

"AT&T plays an important role in helping Aegis to continuously strengthen our technology, which is a critical element of our approach to customer care and acquisition," said Kannan Ramasamy, President and CEO of Aegis. "AT&T's network solution offers the security, flexibility and reliability we need to ensure our applications communicate with each other and our systems exchange information with our customers' systems."

The majority of Aegis' business consists of helping clients manage inbound and outbound contacts with their customers, putting the company on the front lines in the effort to improve customer care. A Purdue University study revealed that 80 percent of U.S. companies provide "poor customer service." A recent Better Business Bureau telephone survey of 1,000 households found that 73 percent had experienced customer rage recently.

In contrast, annual surveys consistently rank Aegis in the top 10 in inbound and top 20 in outbound contact management.

AT&T also will also provide the highest availability and reliability by deploying AT&T ACCU-Ring(R) Network Access Service at Aegis' headquarters building. ACCU-Ring's self-healing capabilities help ensure financial, customer relationship management and business data can flow securely and uninterrupted among the company's locations.

In addition to VoIP, the network will handle critical business applications as well as e-mail and Intranet services. Additionally, AT&T's enterprise hosting services offer Aegis a continuum of hosting and management capabilities that provide a flexible, global infrastructure supporting their e-business applications.

Aegis can monitor the performance of its network and applications through the secure AT&T customer portal, AT&T BusinessDirect(R), which provides operational efficiencies including around-the-clock online access to real-time reports on network performance and direct connection to trouble management systems