Citizen Kane

John Kane isn't exactly facing a turn-around job at ICG Communications, but things certainly will change under his leadership.

Since being named president and chief operating officer of ICG in June, Kane has been faced with transforming the first generation competitive local exchange carrier (CLEC) - and recognized as the largest independent CLEC - into an organization that can compete with some of the biggest names in telecom, including AT&T and MCI WorldCom. At the core of that strategy is the realization that customers don't necessarily care about the underlying technology.

"The killer app is a concept that generally is technology-oriented," he says. "Increasingly, the customer is becoming kind of ambivalent to technology and more focused on service. ICG's killer app is service."

Still, Kane, who has a long history in the competitive telecom market, including serving as president and director of America's Carriers Telecommunications Association, knows technology is at the heart of everything the company is planning during the next 12 months.

ICG currently is testing voice-over-DSL equipment in its lab while also investigating IP voice service and the latest ATM technology to support its burgeoning Internet business. Those developments may put ICG in direct competition with the latest version of CLECs: the data CLEC. It's a fact that Kane isn't losing sleep over.

"It bothers me that there are bunch of service providers that are calling themselves DSL companies," says Kane, who has worked with several start-up carriers himself. "DSL is a technology. It's what you do with the technology that matters."

However, one of his duties of late has been convincing Wall Street of that fact.

"ICG has been more buzzword-oriented in its history because the analysts were following the buzzwords. My job is [to] re-educate the analysts to not follow buzzwords and look at things like profitability. I have real customers who send me a check every month."

During the next 12 months, Kane hopes to meet his ambitious goal of growing more than any CLEC ever has. "That's challenging and interesting to me," he says. "I like to do things that know one else has done before. It's easier to escape criticism if you can be different."