Watch John

After a three-year hiatus from the telecom industry in which he worked for the state of Colorado (on a $1 annual salary), former Metapath founder John Hansen was tempted back into the private sector by mobile OSS firm Watchmark-Comnitel. The subject of this month's Forward Motion speaks to Ed Gubbins about his changing career.

On his background: I was the founder and CEO of a Seattle company called Metapath. That was merged and then sold. I left in 1999 and moved my family down here to Colorado in early 2000. The governor called me up and said, “Why don’t you do something different?” I said, “Well, okay.” It was kind of a way to help out Colorado and give back. I didn’t feel it was appropriate to draw the cabinet’s salary, which was $122,000. I wanted to make sure everyone knew why I was doing it. I was truly there to make an impact.

On government work: The government makes very poor technology decisions. You always hear about tremendous cost over-runs, and then the service that’s deployed doesn’t work. Internally government is a socialistic system. Business is capitalistic, meaning if you don’t change, evolve or make wise decisions, your company dies. And we let it die. If a government employee makes a mistake, they don’t get fired. There’s no accountability. The people in state government have good hearts. I said to them, “Think about your careers. Don’t you want to have the latest skills? When you leave, don’t you want a good private-sector job? Let me teach you how this is done in the private sector.” I put in some standard practices: Here’s how projects should be done, here’s how procurements and purchasing should be done, here’s how we should do our contracts. The vendors were the funnest. I’d sit down with the vendors and say, “I know the game you’re playing. I used to be there. Now we’re going to create contracts that hold your feet to the fire that have liquidated damages.” They’re going, “Oh my gosh! Who is this guy?” When I started, Colorado was 27^th in the digital state survey. The new survey’s coming out in the next couple months. Hopefully we’ll be in the top 10.

On Watchmark: Watchmark did not have a CEO for a year. It has a tremendous financial and product foundation. It’s hard to get excited about performance management [PM]. Except for 3G, not too much is being deployed. What’s exciting was on the service quality management [SQM] side. All these exciting new services were starting to come out. I could see emerging wireless technologies. The old ideas we thought about for years: true integrated wireless solutions, meaning Bluetooth locally going to Wi-Fi in the house and walking out and using broadband in ubiquitous connections. We’re just right at the cusp of some exciting services, but people are putting these services in as warts on top of the network, and no one has a clue how to manage them. GPRS is a classic example. The people who’ve deployed GPRS to get data services are having trouble managing the networks. I’m going, “Wow, this SQM built on top of PM is just going to explode!” Watchmark provides the management of all these new services. We don’t provide the services, but we provide the management and the quality metrics for these.