FAST FORWARD

On April 1, EDS veteran John Meyer became Lucent Technologies' new president of Worldwide Services, which is the vendor's primary focus for revenue growth. Services is a $44 billion market and currently accounts for 23% of Lucent's revenue. Meyer recently spoke with Ed Gubbins about the new vendor environment.

On sleeping with the enemy: Our solutions need to be best-in-class, not [just] Lucent's solution. So we're going multivendor, striking relationships with Cisco, Corrigent and another I can't tell you — people who compete with Lucent. In the hallways of Bell Labs, I'm speaking sacrilege.

On potential new services: We compare the interoperability of our products with others. Most of the major service providers also have a similar function. Because of our multivendor push, there's no reason why carriers couldn't just use our facilities to do that. That's a major cost-savings for them. Another recent one is disaster recovery. None of the networks can afford to have a large switch sitting there waiting for a disaster. We've got the switches sitting there. Carriers can purchase 40% of a switch and share it. They can buy this insurance policy and use it for testing and other purposes, but they've got it available if disaster occurs. We have our own NOCs, so it's an easy extension. We haven't sold that yet.

On his qualifications: I've been doing this for 20 years. At EDS it was always multivendor because we never had any of our own products. And I've spent half my life and career outside the U.S. This is a global industry. I was international finance director for EDS with staff in 28 countries. I ran European operations, which was a 42,000-person, $7 billion business.

On his reported start date, April Fools' Day: Actually, as part of the typical Lucent productivity program, I worked three days before that and wasn't paid for it.

On what's next: I think the market will evolve to value technology less and business more. Our products will be priced differently, based on the business value. If [carriers] measure their success on the number of users or the number of minutes, we'll price our services in those terms.