Cramer crows about BT deal

UK-based operations software supplier, Cramer, announced the largest engagement in its short history today and one of the largest for a pure-product inventory company in recent years. Cramer is supplying BT with its full suite of operations and network management software for the buildout of its 21st Century Network.

Citing Cramer’s long-term vision and ability to deliver after 18 months of proof-points, BT Wholesale CIO Phil Dance gave Cramer the thumbs up on the multi-year, multi-million dollar deal.

“This is an absolute landmark,” said Jerry Crook, CEO at Cramer. “I don’t think there are many deals worldwide of this size for a product company in licensed revenue. It’s absolutely huge.” Crook said that although Cramer is a product company, the relationship with BT goes beyond licensed revenue.

“It’s a strategic relationship and not just an OSS vendor showing they’ve got a foothold in BT. It’s a key component of BT’s whole forward thinking architecture, strategy and delivery,” he said.

The deal caps a year that has seen 67% growth and approximately $65 million in revenue for Cramer as well as a 20% growth in its employee base. Last year, Cramer opened offices in Tokyo, Syndey, Stockholm, Madrid, Atlanta and Dallas. It also has added full-time staff to deal with the design and architecture efforts of this BT project.

“BT is a landmark relationship, but the Tier 1 relationships we now have around the world are driving us to recruit all over,” Crook said.

Two main factors contributed to Cramer winning the business, Crook said. While Cramer is a product company it possesses a great deal of knowledge about how Tier 1 telcos operate. The same can certainly be said of its competition, especially companies such as Telcordia, so the second factor may have made more difference.

“Our product was developed as a generic, non-domain specific and non-technology specific [way], so it can exist inside BT and cope with all the domains and technologies running there,” Crook said.

He also said the Cramer solution is fundamentally different from others in that it is an actively managed inventory and not a “database of record”—a term commonly used within the industry.

“The database of record is exactly what BT doesn’t want and exactly what Cramer doesn’t supply,” Crook said. “It is the very disease that telcos worldwide suffer from because you have to continually audit.”

Cramer’s value proposition, Crook said, is based on a live and highly accurate inventory that is an active part of the network. He compared it to the building of a car with thousands of moving parts yet the manufacturers somehow get the cars out the door with 99.99% accuracy.

“The only way a telco will ever achieve that level of productivity is not to allow a database-of-record concept to prevail inside the telco. It’s got to be an actively managed inventory,” Crook said.

It took three years of discussion and 18 months of proving its scalability and ability to handle a project of this size, but BT bit on Cramer’s philosophy to the tune of tens of millions of dollars over the next three to four years.