AT&T Partner Exchange Portal Integrates With Salesforce

**Editor’s Note: Click here for Channel Partners’ extensive coverage of AT&T’s inaugural Partner Exchange Summit.**

AT&T PARTNER EXCHANGE SUMMIT — AT&T’s solution providers are getting new and improved tools to grow their businesses and speed up transactions.

At its inaugural Partner Exchange Summit in Irving, Texas, on Tuesday, the company announced that it plans to integrate its partner portal with Salesforce.com. The decision was made based on feedback from solution-provider partners, many of whom already do business through Salesforce.

Brooks McCorcle, president of AT&T’s Emerging Business Markets, the group that heads Partner Exchange, expects this to be a huge opportunity for partners.

“What that will do is speed up the deployment of our APIs (application programming infrastructure) and make it easier for them to consume,” McCorcle said, in an interview with Channel Partners. “So they’re consuming it as a widget as they do with their other functions in Salesforce. It’ll be Partner Exchange on steroids — faster to transact business with AT&T.

Also on Tuesday, the company said that Partner Exchange members can look forward to the opening up of mobility APIs.

“We’re going to put never-before-seen capabilities in your hands so you can provide a best-in-class mobility experience,” Jason Porter, vice president of product management and operations, AT&T, told a room full of solution providers on Tuesday.

The Partner Exchange was built on the idea of an open API platform, which enables solution providers to build on top of AT&T’s APIs to create their own customized applications that they can sell – all powered by the AT&T network.

First unveiled last month, Porter added that solution providers will soon be able to take advantage of AT&T Network on Demand, which the carrier says ultimately will enable businesses to add and change network services in near real-time. Commercial rollout in Austin, Texas, is expected by the end of the year, with additional market scheduled for deployment early next year.

“You can turn up service for your customers in seconds,” Porter said. “You can literally add from 5MB to 10MB in seconds.”

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