Making face with e-business: Cygent's front-end niche pays off

It all boils down to this: Cygent is just a front man for e-business, a poster child for Java Bean technology, an enabler, a middle manager. It's just a product.

These are Cygent's good qualities. And they have been good enough to earn the company a solid position in the e-business and operations support system (OSS) marketplace as a link between wholesalers and retailers and as a face for those companies' customers.

Such seemingly irreverent qualities also have helped secure a third round of financing worth $40 million, part of which came from strategic partners within the OSS space.

What do they do? "We just manage the customer experience," said Kevin Elmore, president and CEO of Cygent. "That focus has made it easy for us to make a lot of ground up in a very short time."

Starting from the premise that "best of breed" is the only successful approach in the telecom business, Cygent provides a common interface for multiple providers. Managing the customer experience in this sense includes presenting a unified face to the customer through a user-configured interface. "The look, feel and navigation of the product has to be configurable by the customer because it has to reflect their brand image and what they do," Elmore said.

As a result, Cygent is not a household name. Its face is often hidden behind the providers it represents, which is the lot for many OSS providers.

Cygent software now will be hidden behind MetaSolv Software's telecom business solution (TBS) software. The companies formed an OEM agreement in June, whereby MetaSolv will incorporate Cygent's e-business self-care portals. The portals should be ready by the fourth quarter. Future functionality includes allowing TBS-driven service providers to use branded Web sites for offering online shopping, electronic bill presentation and payment (EBPP) and pre-qualification and ordering of DSL service.

"MetaSolv has partnered with all the market leading applications that surround them in the OSS infrastructure," Elmore said. "I wouldn't anticipate that the MetaSolv relationship will be anything but positive for us."

MetaSolv also is among a new group of investors that provided Cygent with its third round of financing. Sun Microsystems is another. "Our architecture is built on Java, so we're really the poster kids for Java Bean technology in communications," Elmore said. "Getting Sun's validation of what we have done with their technology is important to us. It gives us an entry into almost every communications player, especially [in] e-business."

The leader of Cygent's latest funding round is Charter Growth Capital. In addition to infusing cash, Kevin McQuillan, the firm's general partner, joined Cygent's board.

"People in the telecom service area are trying to find ways to leverage their business. People have tried to home-grow their own front-end systems, but it's easier for them to buy [an] existing product from a vendor and devote their engineering resources to doing something else," McQuillan said.

Vectris Communications, a Midwest broadband service provider, did just that. "You always consider doing in-house development, but then you get down to decision of timing and of cost and future flexibility and functionality," said John Moshier, senior vice president of marketing at Vectris. "One of the things you want to consider as a service provider is the ability to partner electronically with other providers. The more you custom build yourself, the harder it is and the longer it takes to do that kind of partnering."

Vectris uses Cygent to manage the interaction between its wholesale and retail partners and other supply chain partners. As a "CiscoPowered company" and neighbor to Cisco's lab facilities in Austin, Texas, Vectris has the advantage of working with Cisco and Cygent in the lab to develop solutions.

"We selected Cygent fairly early on in the company's life cycle," Moshier said. "It was a fantastic application out of the box for retail. We have worked with them to build quite a bit of functionality into it that is tailored for the wholesale marketplace."

Cygent also has taken its product overseas. Telecom Italia is implementing Cygent to support marketing, online shopping and ordering, EBPP and customer self-care for its 25 million customers.