Intelligence mission

The wireless intelligent network has had a long, frustrating and unfulfilling history. Despite the widespread acceptance of its wireline compatriot, the Advanced Intelligent Network, the WIN concept has been mired in the development stage for years. Even the largest wireless network operators are only beginning to inject intelligent components into their network schemes.

Imagine, then, if you had devoted your life's work to supporting the formation of the WIN and the dissemination of its message to the industry. That's what Michael Buhrmann has been doing for nearly 20 years, and he's still doing it. But his professional history is far from frustrating and unfulfilling.

Buhrmann's most recent effort is Global Mobility Systems, a provider of enhanced services software platforms and consulting services that is pushing innovation to the wireless sector. Buhrmann sees GMS as more than an equipment vendor. The company's goal is not only to give wireless operators the tools to make their services different, but also to show them exactly how it can make a difference.

"Sometimes technology doesn't catch up because people can't envision it," Buhrmann says.

Buhrmann, a long-time proponent of the WIN, hopes that the efforts of GMS will help people finally identify with the logic of the concept. His current involvement on the equipment side is not new, despite the fact that until the formation of GMS he worked exclusively for carriers.

Buhrmann's first imprint on the wireless industry came in the early 1980s, when he helped Bell Canada International build a wireless system based on the Nordic Mobile Telephone format in Saudi Arabia. When he returned to the U.S. he had the entrepreneurial bug, so he joined Canadian wireless upstart Rogers Cantel in 1990.

That marked the beginning of his WIN quest. His mission at Cantel was to move network intelligence-in the form of the wireless network's home location register-off the switch and onto a service control point platform. He succeeded in developing a solution with the help of computer vendor Tandem.

In 1992, Buhrmann joined McCaw Cellular Communications and was charged with the task of developing new services that would bring in new revenue. He helped develop what AT&T Wireless Services now calls Wireless Office, a tiered platform that melds the wide area wireless network with private in-building systems and separates pricing and radio coverage accordingly.

While McCaw Cellular was being acquired by AT&T, Buhrmann was also busy forming the Universal Wireless Communications Consortium, an organization devoted to the expansion of IS-136 time division multiple access technology and the concept of the WIN. In addition to being president of the UWCC, Buhrmann stayed on in the post-McCaw era as vice president of wireless strategy at AT&T Wireless. He left in 1997 and founded GMS.

Buhrmann is a standout among McCaw alumni because he did not follow his former leader, Craig McCaw, to one of many new carrier operations. He wanted to focus on putting new intelligence into the components of the network without the distraction and pressure of keeping the carrier operation afloat.

"At McCaw we could create products," he says. "At some of the new companies, they can't do that because of the competition. If anyone brings carriers an idea they have to spend a lot of time on, it's not going anywhere."

Part of the push for GMS-and any other vendor developing components for the WIN-has nothing to do with technology. It has to do with breaking through preconceived notions and convincing carriers that there is a new way to position services.

What's driving the WIN concept now more than ever, Buhrmann believes, is that wireless operators have slashed prices as low as they can go. With price competition no longer a viable way to be different, he says carriers must now pursue service enhancements driven by WIN components and learn how to position them in the eyes of customers. Competition and the efforts of people like Buhrmann may finally be waking carriers up to the concept.

"You're changing the way a carrier approaches their customers and actually sells," he says. "It's the convergence of timing, recognition and execution."