IBM grows telecom presence with Telcordia server deal

Telcordia Technologies will begin porting two of its software suites onto IBM’s pSeries servers, giving IBM a larger presence in the telco back office while bolstering Telcordia’s international expansion plans.

Currently running primarily on Hewlett-Packard servers, Telcordia’s Work Force Management Suite and Network Provisioning Suite of software solutions will be offered on HP and IBM platforms beginning around September 2002.

The new business arrangement includes consulting, systems integration, maintenance and installation support from IBM’s Global Services organization and financing from the company’s Global Financing group.

“Working with IBM is not new to Telcordia, but it is a strong move in the OSS arena that will bring functionality to the marketplace on IBM platforms that we haven’t had before,” said Rick Stomp, vice president, global telecommunications industry for IBM.

Telcordia already uses the pSeries servers for its Integrated Service Control Point solution, which is used globally for 800-number translation and other intelligent network services.

In addition to technical advantages in price and scalability, Telcordia expanded its relationship with IBM for business reasons.

“A major factor was the potential IBM offers Telcordia as an alliance partner,” said Dennis Tinley, vice president of customer solutions at Telcordia. “They have a strong international footprint that is very complementary with our strategy…in many of the countries and companies we are targeting.”

Telcordia began an aggressive expansion into Europe last year with the creation of independent legal entities in Ireland and the Netherlands that gave the company a local identity. The relationship with IBM is expected to support that expansion.

“While we have hired local people, our strategy was, and is, to complement that with local and major global partners. No one company can do it alone,” Tinley said.

For IBM--a company that increased its share of the worldwide server market by 7 percentage points to 30.3%, according to Gartner Dataquest--the Telcordia deal could give the company more recognition in the telecom space and provide the groundwork for selling its service creation, customer relationship management and integration platforms.

“Every service provider is an IBM customer,” Stomp said. “What we were lacking were new solutions with business partners like Telcordia that service providers could take advantage of.”