Verizon Business generated first-quarter 2008 revenues of $5.2 billion, an increase of 0.4 percent compared with last year's first quarter.

This is Verizon Business' sixth-consecutive quarter of year-over-year, pro-forma revenue growth, the telco said.

Global sales of strategic services – such as IP, managed services, Ethernet and optical-ring services – continued to drive strong growth, exceeding the decline in revenue during the quarter from traditional core voice and data services. In the first-quarter 2008, strategic services generated $1.4 billion in revenue, up 23.5 percent from the first quarter of 2007.

Verizon Business rolled out high-definition (HD) video conferencing in the quarter. The telco also offered enterprise customers with remote locations or smaller networks a new managed services option with its support for Juniper J-series routers.

And the company rolled out its managed local area network (LAN) service in a number of countries in Europe, the Middle East and Africa, and the Asia-Pacific region. Verizon Business also expanded availability of its Hosted Interactive Voice Response (IVR) service to the European market.

Finally, the telco introduced a virtualization service that enables businesses to consolidate multiple IT resources, such as operating systems and software applications, on a single server while providing the same reliability as the traditional one-application-to-a-server model. The company also said that its managed hosting customers will be among the first to benefit from the new functionality of Microsoft Windows Server 2008, the next-generation server-operating system launched during the quarter.

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