XO Communications is taking on the big boys, going right after AT&T and Verizon in courting enterprise and larger business customers. The company has been serving this market but focusing mainly on small to mid-sized businesses. Today, it announced, it is creating a new sales and support organization to specifically target large business needs.

The timing is right, said Tom Cady, president of XO Business Services, because consolidation has left companies with fewer choices, and XO’s network facilities position the company to deliver a high quality of service.

“There are fewer players that truly support the enterprise market,” he said. “We believe that those customers are looking for alternatives. We deal with 400 of the Fortune 1000, and they provide that feedback. When you look at XO as a company, it has very significant assets – 18,000 route miles of fiber, a nationwide IP backbone [800 Gigabit capacity], and the largest amount of fixed wireless spectrum in the country. We have that spectrum in 70 markets, and it’s contiguous, so that translates into big pipes. With all of those assets, we have lived in the world primarily of small to mid-sized businesses. We think that is a big market, and we want to build on our strengths there.”

The strategy is straightforward – XO aims to get a piece of an enterprise’s business, perhaps for redundancy or a niche application such as storage or data backup, so it can prove its value to the customer and ultimately win more business, even the majority.

The company believes it can compete based on superior customer service and support, said Tim Shaheen, vice president of enterprise sales, and on its ability to handle customized private data networks for business continuity/disaster recovery, video applications, storage and backup, and more. “It’s almost like the old CAP [competitive access provider] model,” he said.

The fixed wireless spectrum makes a particularly attractive disaster recovery alternative, Cady added.

To attack this new market, XO has created the XO Enterprise Solutions Group, which Shaheen will head, that will include account teams that combine core sales engineers, legal and financial expertise, project coordinators and account managers, who will work together to design the enterprise solution. “That, coupled with the network assets and footprint” makes XO competitive with AT&T, Verizon and others including Global Crossing, Level 3 Communications, Orange Business Services and Time Warner Telecom, Shaheen said. “We feel we have the right approach to take to market to earn a seat at the table.”