THE FUTURE AS SEEN THROUGH TECHNOLOGY

JacobsRimell came to a fork in the road a few years back and took the road less traveled. The fork was caused by the telecom bust; the road it chose led to cable — not a well-worn path for vendors of operations support systems. To cable providers, OSS is profane telecom jargon.

The company already had secured one of the biggest contracts in cable with Cable & Wireless in 1999, but its sights were still set on the telecom market. When things went south in telecom, JR quickly set about accumulating contracts with the biggest names in cable.

Such a turn of events was not surprising to David Jacobs and Phil Rimell, the namesake founders of the company who built their customer-centric provisioning and management solutions to be network-agnostic. Nor is it surprising that with telecom on the rebound, the two entrepreneurs would find the path to telecom once again.

“We will still maintain our focus on MSOs because we have some very important reference customers,” said Joe Frost, vice president of marketing for JacobsRimell. “But this summer we took a long, hard look at ourselves and saw that we are now ready and financially stable enough to expand.”

Lighting the way down this path is a solution JR introduced this month with its U.K.-based partner, Round, a provider of customer centricity strategy and planning tools. The companies have formed an alliance that combines JR's customer-centric OSS solutions with Round's CCDirector assessment, reporting and planning tool.

Both cable and telecom operators can use the tool as sort of a customer relationship management assessment to see how much they really know about their customers and how good they are at using that information when and where it is needed.

CCDirector assesses more than 60 “strands of capability” in five key business areas: business leadership, customer strategy, organization design, information architecture and performance measures. JR uses its Adaptive Provisioning System (APS) service fulfillment and management platform to apply these assessment tools to network operators to help them evaluate how customer-centric they are across their entire business.

JR may only have 76 employees, but as Frost said, it's about the scale of the directories and the technology, not the scale of the company.

“We do 20 million transactions a day for some of our largest customers,” Frost said. “Comcast has one of the largest [customer] directories in the world.”

The combination of Round's five-point evaluation and JR's APS platform and familiarity with service providers' OSS processes is designed to help service providers prioritize their capital investments in such a way that makes them more customer-centric. It also makes them answer the question: Who designed a new product or service, you or the customer?

JR says that service providers must be more responsive to the needs and desires of its customers when designing new services and tailor them so that the customer has more control over those services and their experience with them. JR's platform takes the knowledge about the customer and the assessment of customer centricity supplied by Round and applies it to streamlining the fulfillment process and reducing errors, which may be good for the customer experience, but is ultimately best for the service provider's bottom line. And no one needs an assessment tool to know how service providers feel about that.