In today’s fast-paced environment, businesses face constant decisions, where making a choice often means having to compromise. How to operate at a high speed, but also execute with precision? How to be open to connect anywhere and also remain highly secure? How to stay true to their local and long-term customers, but also grow globally?
PayPal is one company that successfully navigated these issues. In September 2014, eBay announced that it would spin off its PayPal business unit as a separate, stand-alone corporation. AT&T understood the challenges. PayPal had nine months to completely separate its assets, including building an independent global network from scratch. AT&T had collaborated with eBay for many years and realized the PayPal spin-off would require a network that could be deployed to all PayPal sites globally, as well as have the capacity to meet PayPal’s ongoing growth. Knowing it could build the robust and reliable global network PayPal needed, AT&T got to work.
AT&T Technical Engineers and AT&T Consulting met PayPal engineers and leadership at their worldwide operations office in Omaha, Nebraska, to lay out a network design that aligned with PayPal’s post-separation requirements. AT&T delivered its Virtual Private Network (AVPN) in June 2015. The network currently manages all of PayPal’s connections between data centers and offices across the world, connecting all 15,000 employees on one network. It provides flexibility and scalability to grow as PayPal makes acquisitions and opens new locations.
“We helped create and deploy the entire network in a very short time, while ensuring PayPal will be global and local, fast and precise, open and highly secure when using it,” says Frank Jules, president of global business solutions at AT&T. “That’s the power of ‘&.’”
“The ‘&’ in AT&T speaks to today’s technology striking the right balance for businesses. We serve more than 3.5 million business customers, including nearly all of the Fortune 1000, delivering all of the connectivity services they need without compromising,” Jules adds. “Our global network connects customers in more than 190 countries and territories, which represent 99 percent of the world’s economy. We were confident we had the experience and expertise to help PayPal hit the ground running with a robust network.”
As the relationship between AT&T and PayPal grew, PayPal turned to AT&T to find a solution for its workforce that uses mobile devices when working on the go or remotely. It needed something that presented fewer vulnerabilities to hackers while remaining easy to manage. AirWatch, AT&T’s mobile device management platform was a perfect fit for PayPal as it accommodates all corporate e-mails and mobile apps used globally in a highly secure fashion and managed by PayPal on one platform. The service also comes with AT&T’s 24-7 application service desk, which serves as an outsourced support team from AT&T, available at all hours to solve any issues with the platform used by PayPal’s mobile workforce. Combined, these solutions minimize disruptions to PayPal’s IT team so that they can focus on business operations.
“AT&T’s consulting group and engineers displayed their expertise early on, so it was natural to trust them to work with us in building a new network and integrating mobile solutions for PayPal,” says Brad Stock, CIO at PayPal.
Jules cites open communication with PayPal as a critical component of each successful project. PayPal openly shared the challenges it needed to overcome to be a successful stand-alone business, helping AT&T to design the right solutions tailored to PayPal’s needs.
Jules concludes, “Companies don’t want to be communications experts—they want to focus on their businesses—that’s why we stepped in to help PayPal make the transition as smooth as possible.”
