Q&A: NSN CEO, ex-CEO stress importance of US, services

Ericsson and NSN have been two of the clear leaders in the telecom outsourcing and managed services market, but you have a lot of potential competition from other vendors like Huawei and more traditional professional services companies like IBM. How do you keep the competition at bay?

Beresford-Wylie: Why is it that we and one of our very large competitors have grown so well in services? I think our customer base—remember we deal with a vertical, and that vertical has real-time networks with their own unique characteristics—when they look for someone to work with they turn to us or another company that comes to mind because of our deep domain knowledge, on the one hand, and on the other hand because we are trusted. You really put your life into the hands of a services company. We have new competitors coming up in the product part of the business who are not jumping into services quite the same. I think it’s a gigantic leap of faith to give your services business to a new company. We have domain knowledge, long relationships andwe’re seen very much as a trusted partner. While an IBM or an Accenture also have great trust-based relationships, I think they’re perhaps a little bit lacking on the connectivity side of the business.

When NSN was formed in 2007, you faced the task of merging two distinct company cultures, a process we’ve covered extensively in our magazine. Almost three years later, do you think the process is complete? Is NSN a single culture, or is it still the product of its parts?

Beresford-Wylie: I think it is. When books are written on this, my sense is we’ll rise quite close to the top in terms of the job we have done, given the fact that we have 60,000 people here. It was fascinating to watch this play out. Outside of Finland and Germany, it happened instantly. It was amazing. In Finland and Germany, which took the brunt of the restructuring, you could feel the stresses and strains. An element is cultural of course. A lot of it was around this-is my-site-my-product, your-site-your-product perception, which injects a great deal of tension into the organization. I think we’re beyond that now. One thing that struck me was we were 90% the same and 10% different. What I mean by that is we all grew up in a traditional telecom heritage as fine engineering companies so there were a lot of similarities. That was good and bad. When one looks to the transformation required now—building the services business, becoming more of a software-and solution-oriented company—then these require the culture to continue to evolve beyond the recent integration. We’re coming from a particular type of company, evolving into something else.

Suri: We started with 60,000 people, we captured the synergies and did the required restructuring. We’re still 60,000 people, but within that number are some 13,000 new people that have joined us primarily due to infusions in the managed services business and in ramping up lower-cost R&D sites in the product organization. If we look at the employee engagement survey that we do—I’ll just give you the numbers we have for managed services—we had something like a 20% increase in employee engagement for these roughly 13,000 people in one year. This tells you that these people, that actually had chosen to work for operator customers but wound up working for us, they see a culture that’s working. It tells you that there is one culture here, and it tells you that they are far more motivated now than they were at the point of joining.

Beresford-Wylie: We are a very global entity. If you look at Ericsson, it’s a very Swedish company if you look at the executives. If you look at Huawei, it’s a very Chinese company. If you look at Alcatel-Lucent--I would hazard to guess--it has a mixture of Americans and French. Now look at NSN. If you count me as two—I’m a dual national--we have six to seven nationalities on our executive board. Look across the company. While we have a lot of people that came from Nokia and Siemens, we have a fabulously diverse company in every sense actually, in terms of nationality, gender and age.