Fast Forward

Former PeopleSoft Executive Vice President Guy Dubois has plans to expand Cramer's product portfolio and reach, as well as beef up the company's services and development organizations. He'd be doing well just to duplicate the OSS company's pace in 2005, when it signed up one carrier customer per month. He spoke to Telephony's Tim McElligott about how he plans to do that.

On leveraging his PeopleSoft experience: PeopleSoft was very much a U.S.-centric company, and one of my jobs was to rebalance that. Rebalancing and building a global company active in America, EMEA and Asia/Pac is also an essential challenge for Cramer. Cramer will very soon become a multiproduct company.

On his top priorities: My first ambition is to bring Cramer to the next level with an end-to-end OSS. We will look northbound to the service catalog, which is essential for bringing new services, and south toward activation, which is essential to making an end-to-end OSS real. One of my first decisions was to double the number of developers. We successfully launched a new development center in Bangalore, India, last year and now have the power to accelerate our development. We will introduce half of our new products in the first part of 2006.

On acquisition aspirations: We do not have “not invented here” syndrome. I love my engineers, but if there is a way for me to accelerate the build-up of my product road map, I will take all options — and I am working on all options as we speak.

On OSS standardization: I have come to this industry only recently, and I am amazed, looking at this OSS sector, at how fragmented it is and the lack of standards and the lack of integration. I am amazed at the lack of interoperability between systems, and I've been amazed to see that huge players like telco providers haven't been able to drive standards to make their life better.

On what makes Cramer unique: We try to focus on a few dimensions where we can make the difference. One is scalability. Telefonica in the next four years said 60% of their subscribers will have a 50 Mb/s connection. That's what I call a scalability challenge. We believe we have the proven technology to do that. Another area is cost of ownership. We believe we will differentiate ourselves dramatically because of the integration of all our components around one platform. We feel pressure to bring not [just] a cheaper piece of software, but a better total cost of ownership. Our OSS factory takes 40% less time to deploy, and that's the kind of thing customers are asking for.