How NSN plans to take over US networks

In turn, NSN believes it can turn the cost center of network operations into a profit center by introducing a greater level of efficiency than its carrier customers could. The vendor has a bible of best practices it has gleaned from 170 outsourcing customers across the globe. And it can apply automation tools to network operations that would be expensive for a single carrier but, distrubted across NSN’s global customer base, seem cheap.

“If we’ve got something that’s working well in Brazil, there’s no reason why it does not translate to work well in North America,” Paris said.

NSN also claims to be able to overcome “internal inertia or politics” that prevent carriers from maximizing operations efficiency. Though the vendor expects to typically take posession of some carrier personnel when it lands these deals (NSN adopted 265 existing Embarq employees), it says it can re-educate that workforce and reorganize its structure for efficiency through upper-level changes.

These personnel issues will likely be one of the key challenges facing NSN’s outsourcing business, Marcus said. “The transition of a large number of employees from one corporate parent organization and culture to another can be a difficult challenge. Employee morale and organizational stability are tested severely in any such transaction, tests which must be passed in order to avoid losing market momentum and degrading service quality. This is especially relevant in network operations outsourcing, since operating the network is core to the service provider’s business.”

NSN will retrain former carrier employees to look at things from a profit and loss perspective rather than merely a cost perspective, providing clarity in place of the clashing priorities of different departments that can bog projects down in a tug of war.

“One department is worried about quality, another department is worried about cost or time to market,” Paris said. “And those three elements are not working together. The guy who’s worried about quality doesn’t care about the revenue side.”

However, as Embarq did, carriers that outsource their operations are likely to retain their field technicians.

“The people they have out in the field that fix the boards, change the cards and [get their] hands on to the switches, those people remain [with the carrier],” Paris said. “They do all the remote maintenance, monitoring, surveillance of their network.”

One reason for that is simply that field technicians are more likely than network operators to be union employees, which would make their transfer to another company more difficult.

However, that separation means that NSN employees must give orders to Embarq technicians. And giving orders to one’s subordinates has a different dynamic than giving orders to the employees of one’s customer.

“We’re responsible for the [key performance indicators] and [service level agreements] of the network,” Paris said. “We’re the only ones that see it end-to-end. If a [carrier] employee is not meeting their job responsibility, not fixing something in the amount of time that the SLA or KPI says it should take, we report it [to the carrier].”