How to Sculpt Wireless Art From a Wireline Artifact

Ask Teresa Vega how her wireless experience at Lucent Technologies prepared her for the challenge of helping an old-line developer of operation support systems break into uncharted industry sectors, and her answer is concrete. Not concrete as in the opposite of abstract — concrete as in the construction material.

“I know how I won at Lucent,” Vega said. “I mean, I paved roads in South America to put up towers.”

When asked for clarification on whether she actually piloted the cement mixer, Vega — who is now a sector vice president for Telcordia Technologies and group president of the company's wireless, cable and emerging markets unit — was somewhat less animated, as befitting one of the top executives at an institution working to shake its ties to the former Bell System and be perceived as a nimble software competitor: “We did whatever it took to meet the customers' needs,” she said.

What Vega did at Lucent was serve as the chief operating officer of one of the vendor's largest divisions — the one responsible for cranking out all that wireless network infrastructure that helped Lucent win all those contracts and make all that money during the 1990s. There, Vega oversaw product management, RF engineering, field deployment and marketing, among other responsibilities. Road construction wasn't necessarily one of them, but the '90s being the wireless land-grab they were, it easily could have been.

“Having to manage through the tumultuous market of the '90s in wireless was a great experience,” Vega said.

It was her wireless fluency that made Vega an ideal candidate for one of the most important management positions in the “new” Telcordia structure that was crafted under the leadership of Matt Desch, who became CEO in July 2002. Having competed head-to-head with Vega's Lucent unit when he ran the wireless infrastructure division of Nortel Networks in the 1990s, Desch certainly knew what it took for Vega to help Lucent accomplish what it accomplished. Given the opportunity the wireless market offered and the fact that Telcordia is new to wireless, it was critical to Desch that the company's wireless efforts be led by a veteran of the sector — as Vega herself put it, someone with “a lot of business experience, a lot of experience developing new business and new customers and a real sense of the speed with which the wireless market moves.

“In trying to build credibility in the mobile space, it's important to have some wireless pedigree,” Vega continued. “Perceptions change a lot when Matt and I go out and visit wireless carriers. But it's one thing to have them know you're a wireless person, and another to deliver the products. We get some credibility around this ‘new Telcordia’ thing, but with mobile carriers — and with carriers in general — the proof is in the pudding.”

Telcordia's wireless pudding, as it turns out, is still congealing. What Vega discovered when she joined the company in November 2002 was that although Telcordia had a deep R&D background in wireless, products with commercial viability for the sector were another story.

“I was surprised by the amount of expertise we have here in RF science and technology,” Vega said. “It was more than I would have expected from Telcordia in this space. That said, we haven't really used that to leverage a wireless business as much as we could have. Prior to Matt's arrival at the company, the vast majority of the work going on was in support of the major RBOC clients.”

Telcordia's most immediate wireless opportunity was in the area of wireless number portability. Together with partner TSI Telecommunication Services Inc., the company quickly gained 85% of the U.S. market share, winning contracts from seven major operators for software and interconnect services. To Vega, however, it's only a start — albeit a good one that helped the vendor stake a claim in previously untapped territory.

“Big success, niche opportunity,” Vega said of the wireless number portability contract wins. “But it's also a really good story of an asset we had that was adapted to the wireless space.”

That last point represents one of the fine lines Telcordia must toe: As much as the company wants and needs to leverage its experience on the landline operations support and network management side, it also must be careful to avoid fostering the perception among mobile service providers that it is little more than a wireline wolf hawking repackaged goods to wireless sheep.

“You can't go into a wireless carrier and try to sell them landline solutions,” Vega said.

As driven as she is to help Telcordia make its mark on the wireless sector, Vega said she is realistic enough to know that entry into a new sector will require strategic partnerships and even possibly acquisitions, not just adaptation from wireline products. Where it makes sense, however, the company is adapting products to meet the needs of wireless carriers.

One of those existing systems proved useful for addressing one of the newest phenomenons in wireless service: the mobile virtual network operator (MVNO) model. Telcordia was early on the North American MVNO scene when it scored a contract win with upstart Virgin Mobile USA last year to supply its ISCP service creation as a platform from which Virgin could offer prepaid services. Telcordia's ISCP is another product with origins in landline networks which, equipped with a set of wireless capabilities, can be used to manage services like the prepaid applications Virgin offers, Vega said.

It was, in fact, Telcordia's wireline heritage that drew Virgin to Telcordia. Virgin needed a supplier that could help make its system as reliable as a wireline telephone network, and for whatever it lacks in wireless experience, Telcordia certainly is no stranger to providing telco-grade systems.

“The entire infrastructure had to work with telephone company reliability, especially on the back office side,” said Michael Parks, a Virgin Mobile USA executive who helped specify and implement the Telcordia system. “I believe very strongly we would never have launched on time without Telcordia.”

Despite the success Telcordia has enjoyed deploying the ISCP with Virgin and other mobile carriers, Vega is characteristically pragmatic about the opportunity and the adaptation it requires to meet the rapidly expanding needs of wireless carriers.

“ISCP is a really good vehicle for global marketing entry and is a good product in the service creation space,” she said. “It is not the only thing we need, and it is going to need some evolution to become an IP content management gateway.”

To date, Telcordia's wireless experience has been somewhat piecemeal, helping wireless carriers solve this problem or that with product adaptations while simultaneously proving its mettle in new areas. That approach is simply a symptom of entering a new sector, Vega said, but there is an endgame in mind.

“We give them various things in various parts of their business as we try to build all the components,” she said. “We're developing our ability to meet a strategic need, which is to rapidly create and cost-effectively manage new services as wireless goes toward 3G.”

For his part, CEO Desch is quick to point out that while wireless is a critical component of the new Telcordia's strategy, it is only one spoke. Even as it expands into new realms, Telcordia does not want to neglect the hand that has fed it for so long.

“Wireless certainly is important, but it isn't the sole area,” he said. “We still have important relationships with the North American wireline carriers.” To foster those relationships and potentially leverage those carriers' allegiance to existing Telcordia solutions into a penchant for new ones, Telcordia is reducing licensing fees for its core systems by as much as 30% over a three-year period (for more details, see the profile of Telcordia in the Sept. 22 issue of Telephony, a sister publication of Wireless Review).

“They've significantly reduced capital expenditures, and I believe we can dramatically reduce the cost of doing business with us,” Desch said of the ILEC sector. “They need to see that we're going to share their pain with them.”

As for the future pain points of wireless carriers, both Desch and Vega are interested in the opportunities that exist for Telcordia on the services side of wireless more than the more operations-oriented functions of wireless. “Wireless service level management, or service assurance, is one of the most interesting new problems for wireless carriers,” Desch said. “We'll probably never go back and solve the old problems.”

Wireless carriers' desire to crack the corporate enterprise sector is the newest of the new problems they face, and it is indeed there where Telcordia is starting, Vega said. “The real deal is being able to transport corporate data services that we all use every day to wireless,” she said. “Mobile operators increasingly need to walk the dual line of ensuring voice performance while moving to data services and a business environment they don't understand.”

The first test of Telcordia's ability to help carriers navigate the wireless enterprise is in the U.K., where Orange PCS is testing Telcordia's Service Assurance Solution platform on its GPRS network. Wireless carriers in the U.S. no doubt will closely watch the trial as they explore both their own future in mobilizing corporate networks and Telcordia's ability to help them do so.

That situation really encapsulates Telcordia's progress in the wireless sector to date: lots of experimentation, lots of momentum and lots of observation, but only a few real experiences to serve as proof points. More will come in time, Vega said, exuding a strong air of optimism about both Telcordia's opportunities in wireless and the state of the sector overall. “Even in the doldrums we're in,” she said, “wireless continues to have energy and growth, and will be the first to emerge and recover.”