With the launch of the Basic version of its Remote IP Application Management service this month, IT solution provider Verizon Business (verizonbusiness.com) set out to expand the appeal, and the accessibility, of its existing offering.

The Remote IP Application Management service was originally developed by Totality, which was acquired in 2005 by MCI. In January of this year, Verizon Business was formed by the merger of Verizon with MCI.

"What we're doing with this release," says Rick Dyer, director of IT solutions product management at Verizon Business, "is providing a subset of those capabilities as a standalone offering in addition to supporting the overall remote IP application management service."

Dyer says Verizon Business had previously offered some of the capabilities to customers hosting inside its data centers. The key to the new service, he says, is that it is available to customers anywhere, including those using in-house equipment or servers hosted in a third party's data center, as well as customers in Verizon's own facilities.

For customers of the Basic service, Verizon Business will deploy a software agent on the server so it will be able to determine, at the operating system level, O/S process availability, CPU availability, memory status, disk I/O status and port usage. It will also provide operating system patch management, performance reporting via its Total View portal, a fixed number of hours of problem management and change management, asset management and a configuration review on the existing environment.

Verizon will also provide the option for add-on services such as backup recovery management, capacity management and configuration management.

According to Dyer, the Basic service is designed to alleviate a specific resource strain felt by IT service businesses.

"Most of the customers we're working with," he says, "have an IT staff that has a fixed amount of resources available to them to do what they're doing. And the question is do you want to have your guys spending time on your application and what differentiates what you're doing from your competitors and what makes more sense to your business, or do you want to have guys spending time worrying about what patch level is on which server every time a new release comes out from a vendor."

Verizon Business's offerings are built around three spheres of service: the IT management service; the managed application service, of which Remote IP Application Management is a part; and IT infrastructure services. And breaking off parts of those pillars is what the new service is beginning to accomplish.

"We've built on a legacy of the other products we've got in the suite," says Dyer, "which include colocation, which plays in data center infrastructure; we have IP application hosting, which came from the legacy Digex organization and includes support of something within one of our data centers from the hardware layer all the way up through the application; and then when we purchased Totality we gained this suite of capabilities that we now call Remote IP Application Management, which says we can manage the storage operating system all the way up through professional services consulting. But it was really designed as you outsourcing that whole stack off to us. We've identified that there's a demand from customers that provides some of that service, but not necessarily the whole piece."

Offering parts of its larger services, he says, will enable Verizon Business to court customers that fall between the cracks of its more substantial offerings - customers that are already doing part of the work themselves, or just want to round out the product suite they already employ. And that will give the company access to a range of customers it had previously been unable to serve, by recognizing their unique positions.

"Some customers want to outsource everything," says Dyer. "Some customers want to outsource just pieces of it. Some customers are moving everything to an IP environment. Some are not that far along in the process. We need to have a set of solutions that's tailored to what the customers needs are."