IN MEMPHIS, METRO IS KING

Memphis, Tenn., home of Graceland and arguably the birthplace of the blues, has a million stories. This is just one of them—a story of revitalization, of one small, can-do optical broadband service provider and the provisioning and activation deal that almost wasn't.

If Memphis had a heyday, it was long gone by the time metro optical communications technology came looking for a home. The city, in fact, was so far removed from its glory days of Beale Street and Sun Records that the most notable Memphis music of late was the song from former headbanger Joe Jackson, as he transitioned into his swing phase with, “Where the Hell Is Memphis?”

Network planners must have been thinking the same thing when broadband first started sprouting up in Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities, because Memphis wasn't even on their maps.

It's ironic, then, that Memphis would be one of the few places in the U.S. where the mostly dashed hopes for metro optical technology live on. A confluence of happy circumstances conspired in that now re-energized market to save not just metro optical technology, but also the investment made in the city's homegrown broadband services provider, Memphis Networx, by Memphis Light, Gas and Water, as well as others. They also went a long way toward saving the face and new product line of MetaSolv Software, and in a way, the city itself.

In a recent article in the Memphis Manifesto, former Indianapolis Mayor Bill Hudnut, an expert on urban revitalization, said getting broadband into downtown areas is a critical part of encouraging entrepreneurial development, even on a small scale. Memphis Networx has strung 144 strands of fiber across 110 miles of prime and soon-to-be-prime Memphis real estate. It connects to, and has co-location space in, each of BellSouth's central offices.

“I would love to tell you the revitalization of the city is because of Memphis Networx, but I can't,” said Mike Mora, director of information services at Memphis Networx. “All I can say is we are very involved, and we believe that what is taking place here will bring to the table more business for everyone.”

Memphis Networx expects to be a profitable business by mid-2005. Mora said his company has survived so far for several reasons. An 80% investment by the local utility company that allowed them to follow a business model whereby it could bring extra fiber into a location for as little as a T-1 request if there was more opportunity in a building, didn't hurt.

“We were one of the few companies in the nation that continued to build in a market that looked like it wasn't going to come around,” Mora said.

Memphis Networx has had a lot of support from the city's minority community as well, including a group of investors called Memphis Telecom.

“The people of Memphis know we aren't going anywhere,” Mora said.

An influx of biotech companies to the area helped Memphis Networx survive as well. However, Mora said the biggest reason for the company's success so far has been its ability to deliver metro Ethernet and Gigabit Ethernet services quickly. And the biggest reason for that, besides that it laid a whole lot of fiber, is its operations support system.

“We have the ability to react so much more quickly and efficiently than the RBOC or any of the existing ILECs because we are local, we are small and we have a wide open network,” Mora said. And gosh darn it, people like them.

However, the road to a serviceable OSS was not a smooth one, and it almost sent Mora back to the drawing board. First, Memphis Networx had to adjust its business model. It had started as a pure transport company providing bandwidth to other carriers but had to adjust when that market dried up. It turned to the enterprise and delivering services such as metro Ethernet.

That changed its OSS requirements as well. “If I was going to be turning up circuits on a regular basis, I had to have something to do activation for me, and I knew it all had to be controlled by a workflow,” Mora said.

Since the network was supported primarily with Nortel Networks' gear, Mora decided to go with Nortel's ASAP activation engine and Objectel inventory system. “So here was the deal,” Mora said. “I am buying these product sets from Nortel, and the day before I am supposed to cut a check to them, they announce they are selling the product set to MetaSolv.”

His warm fuzzies disappeared. “To tell you the truth, not everyone has had a good experience in my estimation with MetaSolv,” Mora said. “Their TBS product was difficult at best and didn't fit the models we were looking at.”

Mora didn't want to get a year into the deployment and be told he had to buy MetaSolv's TBS platform. “I told them, ‘You are putting my career at stake as well as the potential success of my company, and you need to convince me that I should write this check.’”

MetaSolv's chief operating officer at the time and current CEO, Curtis Holmes, did just that. “Much to my surprise, MetaSolv truly has stepped up to the call of continuing development with this product set,” Mora said.

MetaSolv has since integrated the solutions and announced a product called Metro Optical Provisioning Solution in February of this year. The product includes order management, inventory management and service activation.

In addition to convincing him that he would not be forced to buy into MetaSolv's TBS platform, which the company has since renamed The MetaSolv Solution and has extensively enhanced, Mora said he was able to leverage the downturn in the market to put the queeze on his vendors.

“It wasn't a good time for vendors, and we took advantage of that,” Mora said. He pushed for better service, free training and co-marketing money. Sometimes he got it.

“Eight to 10 months prior to us doing that, you couldn't get away with it. Hardware companies and software vendors were unbelievably cocky because they believed the bubble was never going to burst,” Mora said.

In the end, it worked out for Memphis Networx and MetaSolv both. The service provider got an OSS that will take it into the future as it extends capabilities to self-activation, and MetaSolv got its reference implementation.

“We put forth a lot of effort last year in building this solution,” said Rajeev Tankha, product manager of service activation solutions at MetaSolv.

Not every optical provider will need an automated activation engine, Tankha said. “If you are doing purely long haul optical, you may not be able to justify it, but for a company like Memphis Networx where they have only 20 people for provisioning and activation, it is critical.”

It also becomes critical when Memphis Networx begins to extend provisioning and activation to the end user for things like bandwidth-on-demand. Mora said the company is about eight months away from delivering a Web portal for service activation.

Another requirement for Memphis Networx stemmed from uncertainty about the one-vendor approach for future infrastructure growth. “I wasn't convinced we would be a Nortel shop forever, so I didn't want to rely on their Preside Site Manager for activation,” Mora said. “It would not allow me to leverage multiple vendors.”

Despite its Nortel roots, MetaSolv's solution now supports multiple technologies, vendors and applications through pre-built cartridges that contain the necessary service logic and can be plugged in without having to rebuild the system.

MetaSolv feels that by completing the productization of this solution, it is out in front of the optical OSS market when and if it takes off.

“There was talk about self-activation for metro Ethernet, but the market hasn't really developed,” said Larry Goldman, analyst at OSS Observer. “Most business data and high-capacity services haven't had the volume or uniformity to work for an integrated activation solution.”

Memphis Networx could prove to be the exception. Although it has scaled its business plan from a five-city buildout to focusing on Memphis, Mora said, “Our business is booming around metro Ethernet and gigabit Ethernet, and Memphis is starting to attract a more worldly citizen,” he said. “The graduates of the University of Memphis are staying in Memphis.”