ON THE (CON)VERGE: A CONVERSATION WITH QWEST'S BOB SCHROEDER

When Qwest officially launched its iQ suite of wide-area networking services in January, the carrier was just emerging from perhaps the most difficult stretch in its history. Cleared from the looming threat of a bankruptcy filing, the country’s fourth largest telco’s announcement not only turned the spotlight away from its financials, it marked a renewed push to move Qwest up the market share list in the all- important enterprise services sector. Bob Schroeder, senior director of product management for Qwest’s VPN and managed security services, recently spoke with Telephony’s Vince Vittore about the market’s reaction to iQ and its position among large business services.

On the precursor to iQ: It’s really Qwest implementation of MPLS service. We went to market in initially with this in 1999 with the global product of NetVPN. We had previously started putting customers iQ in December. Now we’re blending in voice-over-IP services.

On market reaction: There are so many more customers that want to hear the story and want to know more than we can schedule. A couple of customers are up and installed.

On adding value: We built iQ to bring value back to data networking. We putting together a layer 2 and layer 3 communications data network. We’ve basically told customers ‘Forget about making decisions on technology.’ The network is much more tunable than ever before. A port is a port. We’re trying to sell at a much higher level.

On the cost savings from operating this type of network: It’s one of the things that really appeals to us. We wanted to build a single NOC, not a frame relay NOC, an X.25 NOC and on and on.

On future application development: We’re not developing applications because we realize we can’t be all things to all people. But there are a number of applications that work well already. IP telephony is an application. Storage area networks are another good application.

On the iQ sales hook: I can buy a T1 but only pay for a committed information rate of something less than that. With iQ, you have a port and you have full access to that port all of the time. People are going to have to change the way they ask for services with this and that’s going to be a great pull from the market.