Building COs and national networks from the golf course

Time to market seems to be everything. Of course, the quality and efficiency of a company's network is critical, too. With equipment becoming commoditized, vendors such as Lucent Technologies and Nortel Networks are stepping up to offer to determine a customer's network needs; help design, implement and operate its networks; and manage the process for voice, data, wireline and wireless networks. The idea is to take the customer to market in the quickest-and most technologically sound-way. Lucent calls its offering NetCare.

Lucent "will engineer, furnish, install and maintain it. They do the whole bit," said Ken Kelly, a senior analyst with Dataquest.

Nortel offers those services as well. "We have the full suite of services to build, design, operate or cooperate any size network for any type of customer," said Terry Devlin, director of strategic marketing for Nortel. "We give them the best time-to-market available."

Once the desired specifications have been decided upon, the customer can give the order and the vendors move into action. Last December, when BellSouth wanted to increase its switching capacity, the increased capacity was added in seven days, according to sources at both BellSouth and Lucent.

"We were anxious to meet explosive second-line and Internet-usage growth," said Bill Smith, vice president of network strategic planning for BellSouth. "When Lucent told us we could meet that demand in seven days, we almost didn't believe them. But it worked. Working together we overcame several problems we knew would occur in any new process like this one."

Lucent put a team of engineers on the project with no preconceived solution in mind. "People in the factory, product developers, engineers and installers, for instance, are an integral part of the team and of the solution," said Karen Stone, switching and access solutions product director for Lucent. A Web-based order realization system gives everyone the same critical information at the same time, thus speeding the process, she said.

The NetCare umbrella also has "Service ADDvantage" to shorten 5ESS switch installation time for standardized models, by conditioning the customer's central offices in advance. Lucent models business and residential customers to get a better idea of now to grow the network, said Jim Laietta, marketing and development director for Lucent.

The BellSouth project "typically would have taken a year under traditional processes. That is not to say that we want to do this in seven days every time," said Michael Opitz, switching sales manager for Lucent. "Now that we have proved we can do it for BellSouth, we can do it for other regional Bell operating companies and competitive local exchange carriers."

One data CLEC passing the build-out baton to Lucent is Jato Communications, which signed a seven-year, $50 million deal with Lucent to build its high-speed Internet and remote LAN access services using digital subscriber line (DSL) technology. "One of our core competencies is customer acquisition, and to make that a focus, we don't want the distraction of building a network," said Brian Gast, CEO of Jato. "We sought to outsource the dep loyment of our network [to Lucent] because they could do it better than anyone else. Timing is so important to the data CLEC environment. If you don't get into a market quickly, you won't be successful, period."

"For someone who doesn't want to be bothered, this is one heck of a solution," said Kelly.

"If I wanted to, I could call from the golf course and order up a network," said Gast.

As to the drawbacks of letting Lucent, or anyone else, do your dirty work, Kelly points to loss of control and costs. "I don't know what they are charging, but you know it is not cheap," said Kelly. Vendors do recommend competitive products when necessary, although they would most likely suggest their own product first, he said.

According to Nortel, pricing varies with each customer's needs. Lucent and Jato declined to comment on pricing.