NGT still looking for its Golden era

New Global Telecom topped off a six-week flurry of strategic change last week with the sale of its General Telecom division. The move helps the Golden, Colo.-based company's new president and CEO prepare for the adoption wave he says is about to hit.

“The industry is on the verge of seeing very rapid growth and increased demand, largely because the problems that have been associated with delivering VoIP are about to be solved,” said Mike Donnell, NGT CEO. “And I think we are solving a lot of those.”

Donnell took over as CEO late last month from company co-founder Rich Grange. Donnell comes to NGT by way of Zi Corp., Cellular One and PageNet. He learned about scaling companies while in those positions and hopes to apply that to scaling NGT to meet expected demand for its wholesale, hosted voice-over-IP (VoIP) service.

Selling General Telecom will let NGT focus on scaling the part of the business in which it sees the better future. The buyer is GT3 Holdings, a company formed and funded by Kevin Alward to own and operate the General Telecom suite of telecom switch partitioning services as a stand-alone entity.

General Telecom was founded in 1990 and became a pioneer in outsourced network management services. It was the first company to offer carrier-neutral switch partitioning.

“We feel there is still a lot of business for what we do today with VoIP-to-TDM conversion, VoIP-to-VoIP-hosted switching and even TDM switch partitioning,” said Randy Weinberger, GT3 vice president and general manager. “We will look to add to our outsourced network management business by using more sophisticated tools for things service providers don't want to do themselves such as domestic routing and number portability.”

NGT has its own go-it-alone strategy. “[General Telecom] was a business we didn't think was strategic to what is ultimately our mission, which is delivering high-quality voice services,” Donnell said. “Now we can focus our resources on expanding the business we feel most strongly about, which is VoIP.”

With that focus, NGT will build on recent moves with partners to provide additional services to its VoIP service provider customers. On Oct. 9, NGT announced a partnership with support services company DecisionOne to provide nationwide field services for NGT's 6DegreesIP customers. DecisionOne will provide VoIP site assessments and network assessments, VoIP installation services and post-installation support services.

The resulting NGT Field Services offering supports both hosted VoIP as well as session initiation protocol trunking services. The service will get additional support from NGT's other new initiative announced in September, the Network Performance Platform.

This platform provides models for standardized service deployments in the form of “cookbooks” and uses certified customer premises equipment (CPE). The program will be rolled out in phases over the next year. Initial phases are focused on standardized CPE combinations and configurations and includes formal LAN assessments, installations and testing.

In what will be an ongoing initiative, NGT has so far certified Polycom devices, Edgewater application layer gateways and Adtran integrated access devices.

Subsequent phases will include CPE surveillance and troubleshooting tools and automated configuration management, security initiatives, hosted test and assessment tools and quality-of-service access services.

These two initiatives are part of NGT's strategy to solve the technical problems holding up widespread adoption of VoIP, as Donnell mentioned. He said these would reduce the cost associated with delivering, provisioning and actually selling VoIP services. “And some of the inconsistent quality issues are about to go away,” Donnell said.

Donnell said these new capabilities open the door for service providers that didn't have the ability to things such as onsite surveys and provides opportunity for new types of service providers.

NGT'S HISTORY

1996
Company founded

MAY 2001
Files for Chapter 11

OCTOBER 2002
Signs three-year deal with Telecom New Zealand

JUNE 2003
Acquires General Telecom

SEPTEMBER 2003
Begins hosting Broadsoft app server

FEBRUARY 2005
Inherits Level 3 wholesale VoIP customers Gets investment from ICG

AUGUST 2005
StarVox buys NGT termination business

MARCH 2006
Receives $10.75 million Series A Preferred Stock financing led by Comcast Interactive Capital

OCTOBER 2006
Names Donnell as CEO