Verizon's Midmarket Play

That division, Verizon IT, plans to offer midmarket companies a broad range of services including managed hosting, network management, help desk and operation and maintenance of legacy systems.

"What we are finding in today's time is that the sweet spot for outsourcing is companies with $250 million in annual revenue upwards to $1 billion," said Del Jenkins, vice president of IT Services for Verizon IT. "The pain that CIOs of these companies are feeling is the pressure to keep spending down while still maintaining legacy and new application efforts, so outsourcing is a very viable option."

Verizon's first tailored offering for the midmarket is a managed service for mobile devices in which Verizon IT remotely manages laptops and PDAs.

"The idea is to push core applications to the remote user and keep them current 7x24 with no interruptions," Jenkins said.

More tailored services are planned, but Verizon IT doesn't operate under a "bundle it and they will come" strategy, Jenkins said. "We plan on meeting with the CIOs and CFOs at each company one-on-one to find out their pain points vs. putting together a bunch of bundles for all midmarket companies."

Solution providers working as agents for Verizon IT's parent company, Verizon Communications, don't view the outsourcing arm's push into the midmarket as a threat. "The kind of account they are going after is way over any account we'd be interested in anyway," said Daryl Senese, director of carrier services at Atrion Networking, a Warwick, R.I., network integrator.

Verizon IT poses little competitive threat on the hardware side, he said. Although solution providers for some time have complained that the IT services arms of some carriers offer customers steep hardware discounts to win services deals, that isn't the case with Verizon, said Senese.

"Over the last three years, I can think of maybe two or three occasions when the issue came up, but it really hasn't been a problem with [Verizon," he said.