Verizon Business today announced a major new push into professional services, making products out of things the telecom giant is already doing for many of its enterprise customers. In addition to increasing the range and breadth of the professional services Verizon Business will offer, the company is making them into standard products that can quickly and easily be deployed.

The move by Verizon Business is just the latest indication of how the IT and communications worlds are colliding.

Verizon Business will now offer 50 professional-service capabilities in 30 countries globally, using 2700 trained and experienced consultants who will focus on five key practice areas: security services, IT services, network integration and engineering, IP communications and contact center services.

Professional services are more in demand as enterprise customers seek to understand and adopt new technology more quickly by outsourcing complex networking tasks to partners of various types, including systems integrators and other networking partners. By providing its own standard professional services capabilities, Verizon Business is preparing to compete for what it sees as not only a growing market but one of increasing importance to its customers, said Mike Marcellin, vice president of Global Product Marketing.

“These professional services were developed in response to the tremendous demand we’ve heard from customers for giving them the strategic guidance they need,” Marcellin said. “They are a natural extension of the types of services we have been offering, that we have seen growing – the number of consultants we use has grown 10% over the last year. We have been doing a variety of different things for some time now, but on more of a custom basis. Now we will have standard contracts and statements of work, which will streamline how we can turn these around.”

Verizon Business has been most engaged in the network integration and engineering area, Marcellin said, and that is expected to be the largest of the five practice areas and will include network assessment, LAN and WAN planning, data center consolidation and relocation, wireless LAN assessments and new technology evaluation.

Security services is a fast-growing practice and will draw on Verizon Business’s acquisition of CyberTrust to offer threat management and protection while the IP-services consultants will focus on helping enterprise customers make the transition from legacy networks to IP-based offerings for voice and data. The contact center practice will draw on Verizon Business’s extensive experience in operating call centers, Marcellin said.