Six months after launching its open architecture strategy called Elementive, Telcordia Technologies Inc. has added to its open application portfolio. The company says it is also readying to expand the Elementive strategy – which today relies heavily on partnerships - through acquisitions.
“We will announce a deal within the next few weeks,” says Telcordia CEO Matt Desch. According to the CEO, the company’s acquisition strategy will fill out its offerings as well as expand its reach into new carriers. “As we acquire companies, it will not change the way we partner. Acquisition just gives us more control of different parts of our Elementive table [of products],” says Desch.
The company says it has won support from both new and old customers for its switch from proprietary OSS and systems development to the Elementive way -- using open programming standards and industry partnerships. “Last year everyone probably thought this [Elementive strategy] was a marketing campaign - just window dressing - but now they see that it has defined how we interact internally and with the market,” says Desch.
According to Terry Vega, group president of wireless, cable and emerging Markets, Telecordia’s wireless business is growing at 70 percent a year and will do so for two years. In addition, 50 percent of that business coming from outside the U.S. is with new customers including O2 in Germany, Idea Cellular in India and Chungwa Telecom in Taiwan among others. Even so international sales remain less than 10 percent of the company’s revenues, but the company believes it has to build its international presence. “We are set on growing our European presence and we are trying to put more people on the ground there and to a lesser extent in Latin America. In Asia we will rely on partnerships like those with IBM and Dimension Data,” says Desch.
At a press event in New York yesterday offering an update on the strategy, Telecordia detailed four new offerings to Elementive product line.
The new Telcordia Revenue Guard is aimed at helping carriers minimizes lost revenue that can occur through discrepancies such as inaccurate intercarrier billing, invalid invoicing, or lack of inventory usage monitoring. It also enables automated correction back to the source to prevent future occurrences.
The product aims to halt unbillable events, which some analysts estimate constitute an average of 10 percent of carrier transactions. It also targets regulatory pressure. “The Sarbanes-Oxley Act has meant a heightened awareness now about where revenue is and [whether it] is being billed correctly,” says Carol Skurkay, vice president of interconnection provisioning and business assurance solutions at Telcordia. The product is currently in its proof-of-concept stage and is expected to be available later in the year.
The remaining three new products - The Telcordia Negotiator, The Telcordia Expediter and Telcordia Exception Manager - support order automation and are the first Telcordia products to be built around partner company ConceptWave's platform. According to the company, some of the functionality of its three order automation products has been available in its existing proprietary offerings, such as the workflow in Telcordia Expediter available in its SOAC product, but the new packages offer a simpler deployment for new customers. “We had products that covered this space before, but we felt the industry needed a standards-based offering to ease installation and integration of new services,” says Skurkay. “We are not replacing SOAC. It’s there and it works,” she says.
The Telcordia Negotiator is an order entry system that can be integrated with existing back-end solutions such as CRM systems to accelerate customer order processing for new services by managing customer-related service, billing, product catalog and order status data. According to Telcordia, the product has already been sold to a European wireline broadband operator, which will go live with the software in July. The product will be generally available in June.
The new Telcordia Expediter application is a workflow management tool that provides a single point of control as well as visual management tools. It supports a range of automatic, semi-automatic and manual processes. Telcordia maintains that SBC Communications Inc. is already a customer of the product and is testing it in its own labs.
The third new application, the Telcordia Exception Manager, is aimed at streamlining work order issues that cannot be completely resolved through automated processes.
On the product side, Telcordia’s Elementive strategy aims to bring applications to enable carriers to deliver new VoIP or optical services, as two examples, while enabling quick returns on those carrier investments. It also means building those applications around software standards including J2EE and TMF 513 as well as providing open interfaces for its existing and deployed applications where customers require it.
In its business operations, adopting the Elementive mantra means more flexible business model for Telcordia. Where the company had traditionally delivered applications after customers asked for them, it now says it is investing in product development ahead of customer demand as well as offering pay-as-you-grow application sales. The company has also pledged to reduce maintenance contracts 39 percent over the next three years.
The strategy also entails partnering with other companies. Telecordia has joined with systems integrators IBM Corp. and Cap Gemini as well as with equipment vendors including Nokia and software companies including Granite Systems and ConceptWave to reach new customers and develop new products.
