MetaSolv CEO Janicki hands reins to Curtis Holmes

Jim Janicki followed his heart when he helped launch OSS company MetaSolv in 1992. He followed it again this week when he made good on a 2.5 year-old promise to ex-Lucent executive and MetaSolv’s current chief operating officer, T. Curtis Holmes Jr. Janicki handed the management reins of the company to now president and CEO Holmes and will return to his passion as the company’s software architect.

Janicki took his small company public in 1999 and enjoyed 12 consecutive quarters of profitable growth. During that time, Janicki earned the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year Award and the Tech Titan Corporate CEO award from the Metroplex Technology Business Council. When times got tough over the last couple of years, Janicki and Holmes worked as a team to reposition and grow the company. Several acquisitions later, including London-based service activation provider Orchestream and significant software assets from Nortel Networks, MetaSolv is a new company.

Holmes, who led Lucent’s Intelligent Network Unit during his 17-year career there, came to MetaSolv in January 2001. He has increasingly become the public face of the company over the last year and has led MetaSolv’s global expansion. He will now be responsible for the overall leadership and strategic direction for the company.

The following are excerpts from a Q&A session on Wednesday, July 30:

How long had this transition plan been in the works?

Janicki: We have been talking about it for a long time. When I interviewed Curtis [almost] three years ago, I told him at that time I was actually hiring my replacement and that it would take two-to-three years. Well here we are. The final straw for pulling the trigger now is that it is the right time. We have come through really what we believe is the hardest time telecom is going to see in a long time. We’re on the road to where we want to be.

We have bought a lot of software over the last couple of years, and we really need to go back and figure out what we want to do with it. That’s what I want to do. Curtis has been waiting for this. And I have been looking forward to it. Now, I am going to go off and do what I’ve always wanted to do, which is go off and play with software again. Being the CEO was just a means to an end--someone had to do it.

We are very fortunate to have someone with [Curtis’] experience. He brings a real wealth of management experience. MetaSolv has gone through a lot of stages in its life, from a start-up in the early days to a fairly good-sized company with 600 people. A different management style is required. We’ve known that and have been preparing for it. Now we have someone who is passionate about software and someone that is passionate about managing the company.

Curtis, what kinds of changes will you be making?

Holmes: This is a great opportunity and an exciting time to be in OSS. We have come through the toughest part of this industry, and [Jim and I] have done that together, working in close collaboration. We will continue to do that going forward as we position company for success in the future.

The approach going forward is just accelerating what we have already been doing. We have great initiatives and have been expanding the business globally. There is still a huge business opportunity outside the U.S., and we haven’t conquered that yet. We are going to go out and do that. We believe the industry, as it relates to IP, is in its infancy state and believe that with our Orchestream acquisition we now have a great opportunity to capture a portion of that market. I still don’t believe mobility is really at a maturation point. We believe that market will still grow, so we will execute on the strategy we have in place there.

Do you see any signs of optimism (Question posed by Yankee Group’s Rob Rich)?

Holmes: We’re optimistic about the future. We recognize the industry may be stabilizing, but we don’t see yet a significant return to even a near normal growth rate. But carriers are starting to have serious discussions about solving some of their opex problems, particularly around OSS.

Jim, as the new software architect, are there any burning software issues you haven’t been able to address as CEO?

Janicki: Yes, there are a couple. We still have work to do on rationalizing some of the inventory stuff we have. We have made some progress there and have done work on the MetaSolv integration platform, which is really the sort of revolutionizing the way we allow people to integrate with us and the way we are providing integration services around the MetaSolv solution. I am really interested in moving that forward and maybe doing more with it than we originally planned. So things like that. We have different activation platforms with great strengths, so we are figuring out how we can have a single activation platform that is seamless from the customer perspective. There [are things we can do] to rationalize [the software] we bought, so those are some of the things I am going to go play with.

Will you be using any particular integration technology? (question posed by Rob Rich and answered in the voice of a true software architect and like no other CEO this reporter has ever heard.)

Janicki: We are doing OSS-J, but also modeling stuff off of the SID [shared data and information model] from TeleManagement Forum. We have created a SID representation in the middleware and wrapped OSS-J around that. When you use Vitria [middleware] and things like that, the maintenance of those cartridges alone became overwhelming for us. So we are going to leverage some of that kind of thinking and technology. We have taken some of the software assets we got out of Nortel, specifically the OMS product, which is actually an integration workflow engine, and we have put a SID look-alike inside of it and put OSS-J wrappers around that. So now we have a standardized interface in and out of the product that maps to a standard representation structure. Instead of having to write converters in the middle, you put your stuff into a standard SID model and get it out of that SID model and don’t really have to know how to talk to each other. Then we have productized some of our APIs and put [them] out there as nuggets that are actually mini-workflows that represent a business unit of work, and we can string together through the workflow engine multiple business units of work to actually represent a process.