Chris Rice Talks About His New Gig at AT&T

Without much fanfare, AT&T earlier this week announced that its long-time CTO, Chris Rice, has been replaced in that role by former VeriSign executive John Donovan. Rice, who spoke with xchange Wednesday about his new gig as AT&T’s executive vice president of Shared Services, said that in the new role he’ll handle corporate-wide procurement and real estate matters, with an emphasis on the data center/content delivery business.

“We’ve had a content delivery service and network since, I think, 1998,” said Rice. “We’ve had a hosting business with a lot of IDCs, we’ve got 38 IDCs, Internet data centers, across the globe. I’m going to focusing on, in that space, bringing those two groups together as begin to scale that business a little more aggressively and introduce different technologies into that space.”

Rice said AT&T believes it can use new advances in technology to more efficiency use energy, by doing things like shutting down all or parts of certain equipment in its data centers and other equipment sites, during non-peak hours.

“From a hosting and CDN [content delivery network] perspective, we acquired USi last year, and they had a hosting business,” said Rice. “AT&T had a hosting business. I’ve got this CDN network that’s out there. For the last eight years I’ve done a good amount of integrating networks from various acquisitions; this is a good opportunity to rationalize those and get our hosting infrastructure and our CDN infrastructure all in a cohesive view and more efficient.”

But Rice’s management of procurement and real estate will not focus solely on data centers, it is corporate-wide, so it also includes AT&T’s mobile switching offices, Project Lightspeed video offices and wireleline offices, he said, noting that’s why the post is referred to as EVP of Shared Services.

Bill Smith, who joined AT&T following the BellSouth acquisition, occupied the Shared Services post most recently, said Rice. However, Smith now handles network services for the wireline business; that includes all the installation, repair, construction, engineering, care centers and installation of our U-verse, Rice explained.

While Rice’s move from CTO to EVP of Shared Services is perceived as a step down, this position is an important one, give CDN space could be very strategic for AT&T. As xchange reported in its March cover story, the CDN arena isn’t just growing, it’s exploding. Demand for online video and gaming is so intense that, last year alone, CDN revenue totaled more than $990 million, according to a January 2008 report by Tier 1 Research. Meanwhile, Frost & Sullivan predicts the CDN field will rake in $2.5 billion by 2013.

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