SAN RAMON, Calif. -- K/P Corp., a direct marketing solutions company, has signed a $1.8 million, two-year contract with AT&T for a hosting and wide area network (WAN) solution that enhances the range of online services it offers customers. The AT&T solution will integrate K/P’s 10 offices and production facilities in California, Oregon, Utah, and Washington. K/P offers a variety of Web-based solutions to meet customer’s marketing communications needs. The AT&T solution significantly improves response time and service levels, enabling K/P’s customers to quickly and efficiently place orders, check status and inventory, track shipments and look at detailed reports of usage and costs. K/P’s applications will be housed in AT&T’s Internet Data Center (IDC) in Redwood City, Calif. For business continuity purposes, back-up data will be housed in another AT&T IDC near Seattle. AT&T owns and operates 21 IDCs around the world and plans to open additional centers this year in Frankfurt, Paris, Tokyo and London. K/P’s Web-based offerings include: • “Perigee”-- K/P’s personalized, multi-channel, multi-touch marketing platform that enables clients to conduct personally relevant direct marketing campaigns that result in significantly higher response rates – therefore improving the return on investment (ROI) as compared to traditional direct marketing campaign methods. • “Vivetry”-- A fulfillment system that provides the most efficient, intuitive way to store, order, ship and track printed materials or other items and is fully integrated to the manufacturing system. • “ClickOn”-- K/P’s print management solution that allows customers to order business cards, letterhead and other branded materials, using the Web and review proofs and check inventory online. • “ChannelXP”-- K/P’s channel marketing and brand management solution. Customers are able to establish templates with approved copy that channel partners and distributors can order over the Web. AT&T’s wide area network, Internet access and hosting facilities are critical to the 24-by-7 performance of these solutions. “Our mission is to leverage information technology and data to add value for our customers and help them to achieve their business goals,” said James Benson, chief technology officer at K/P. “Security, reliability, quality and speed are critical to meet the needs of our customers. Therefore, AT&T is a great fit for us.” In addition to hosting services, the AT&T solution includes long-distance and teleconference voice services, and frame relay and asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) data services. The contract expands an agreement under which AT&T has provided domestic data services to K/P for the past two years. K/P’s services will be integrated through the industry-leading AT&T Business Network (ABN) offer, which consolidates data and voice communications into a single contract, with a single bill and discounts across all services. Through the secure AT&T BusinessDirect portal, K/P gains online access to real-time reports on network performance and direct connection to electronic billing and trouble management systems.