The vendor revisited

The competitive dominoes have begun to fall, and their steady and insistent progress will continue until every last carrier in the industry is drastically affected in some way, for better or worse. New strategies will be launched. Brand images will be made over. Executives of past empires will leave, giving way to the provocateurs of the New Thinking. Market shares will tumble and rise again in other markets.

Last, but certainly not least, important technology decisions will be made. New networks will be built and older networks will be improved with the freshest technology available-DSL, IP, digital wireless or all of the above and more.

Carriers of all kinds will make these significant technology moves at one time or another if they plan on surviving the competitive wars to be waged. However, not all carriers will make these decisions at the same pace. The newest among them are already proving to be more decisive, a bit faster to pull the trigger on broad commitments to next generation technologies than carriers that have been around a while longer.

Many of the new guys have an inherent advantage to making quick decisions in that they are often unencumbered by the pressures of how to integrate these new technologies with other past generation network facilities. But that is not the only thing driving them. They are also inspired by business opportunity, fully aware that the quicker they can get to market and the more differentiation they can have, the more effective they will be in winning the customers that several other carriers also are chasing.

In addition, they are escaping their own pasts, which likely were with organizations where they found themselves among the very few who were willing to throw support behind brand new ideas. Now, that freedom is theirs.

That is the profile of the new network technology buyer. How prepared are vendors to sell to this new type of customer?

It might be a no-brainer. After years of trying to sell technology products through the red tape of methodical old-line carriers, vendors are suddenly faced with the opportunity to sell to a very willing buyer who will approve the whole deal fairly quickly and submit the vendor to standard-but not excessive-technology trials.

Though it may sound easy, there are factors in the purchasing practices of new carriers that could make them a tough sell in their own right. In turn, these factors could force vendors to make some of the same radical changes in their own organizations that they have watched their past and prospective customers tackle in the last few years.

Some of these factors regard timeliness, others have to do with the pricing or even the changing structure of the customer supplier relationship.

For instance, new carriers want to buy technology they know is available now. They won't buy ideas that vendors can then take a year or more to fully develop. Also, vendor pitches have to make strong first impressions because decisions require a lot of up-front information about what can and can't be done.

Also, while new carriers will commit to entire networks full of state-of-the-art technology, they cannot always pay for it right away, and typical start-up debt may limit their ability to do so for at least a few years. For vendors, this means being more open to pay-as-you-grow strategies and long-term financing plans, things that some vendors have not wanted to agree to before.

In addition, the new carrier selling model will often require more education and a much more consultative approach leading up to and including the deployment phase. In some cases, vendors will be guiding inexperienced companies through the motions of building networks. Thus, vendors will have to establish a strong sense of trust that may have been taken for granted in the past, and they will have to prove they can deliver a full slate of solutions rather than just a box to the doorstep.

These all seem like fairly obvious requirements, but vendors may not be as ready to meet them as they think. Some have already made key sales to new carriers, and some have put together special sales teams focused only on new carrier accounts, but the true market opportunity is only beginning to show itself.

Some vendors may think they can sit and collect on invoices as the wild telecom market booms and redefines itself. Little do they know that the domino effect is headed their way, too.