A conversation with Valaran's Darrell Jennings

Valaran’s launch in the year 2000 may have been ill-timed in terms of what lay ahead in its chosen industry, however, the company has survived to hear its original message about the importance of business process management echoed across the industry. Now, three weeks on the job, new Valaran CEO Darrell Jennings has something his predecessor, founder and current board member, Andy Maunder, never had: a North American Tier 1 reference. He’s also got a new round of funding and a new spin on OSS, which is a term that rarely appears on the company’s Web site, except when part of NGOSS, the TM Forum framework it has embraced.

What’s with all the changes over there at Valaran?
Our technology has potentially a very broad set of applications. One of the things we had focused on in the past has been collaborative computing. That ultimately evolved into collaborative gaming between cell phones. As you can imagine, that’s a pretty different set of things to talk about when you are talking to service providers about OSS and networks and infrastructure. We found it was confusing customers and confusing investors and that we really needed two separate companies—one to focus on each area. So we split the company in two. The gaming company is called JamSession. Andy Maurer, who previously led Valaran, has gone to there along with a number of employees. That opened a spot for a new CEO at Valaran. I filled that spot.

Is that why Valaran has appeared a little quiet lately?
That was taking a lot of time and we were in the midst of getting both companies funded. But at the same time, on the Valaran side, we were in the process of [arranging] a fairly substantial trial with a Tier 1 Telco in the US. When you are in the midst of a trial, you don’t talk about it a great deal. 

What became of the trial?
We have made our first deliverables on the trial, but the actual trial starts in early 2004. We would like to see it turn into a business force beyond that. And last week, MCI got up at TMF and talked about the impact they foresee us having to their business as they deploy our technology for generic element management. MCI said by using our technology, they’ll be able to cut, conservatively, 30% to 50 % in opex out of element management and will be able to deploy new elements 60% faster. 

Overall, how has Valaran had to change its product or business to adapt to this economy?
Buying behavior itself has changed dramatically during the nuclear winter everyone has gone through. While in the early days of Valaran, we could look at the technology and say a lot of people were making buying decisions based on the perceived value of technology; today, they are making buying decisions clearly on proof points of the impact on the business, the impact of allowing them to drive their business through processes and making their infrastructure—be it IT or network—adapt to what the business process demands. So we are trying to clearly delineate how our technology enables certain values in that area. Instead of talking about the technology, we are talking very crisply about how we drive cost out and minimize capital expenditure and about the value in the terms they understand: the impact on their business.  

So your product hasn’t changed that much?
We are having to adapt, but our technology hasn’t changed. The way we talk about it to our customers and the way we sell it has changed. We have to position it in the market to be able to adapt to what business problems customers are trying to solve. 

What’s the most critical business problem you can solve?
To some degree, it depends on where the service provider’s biggest pain point is. Some of the biggest ones are in assuring accurate inventory or reconciling stranded assets. There are also lots of savings that come out of the ripples of provisioning. We see the competitive environment our customers are in accelerating. If they try to deal with that kind of pressure by using the traditional static methods of hard coding their system integration, they’ll never be able to keep up. They’ll never be able to keep the service levels that are required to satisfy large customers. 

Tell us about your history.
I have many years of communication industry experience. I spent 17 years at Nortel Networks, where I ran their messaging business on the enterprise side. After that I went to Unisys for about three years working on voice mail, calling cards, prepaid and short message service. I have lots of experience selling to telcos around the world. More recently I was president and CEO of CCC Network Systems where we did remote server management. That had a great deal of commonality with what we do here at Valaran. I was also Chairman and CEO of Computer Task Group.