Getting Friendly with Customers
By Evan Blackwell
from the April 2, 2001 issue of Broadband Week
The new enhanced services division at broadband systems provider ADC Inc. wants to get more personal. That comes across when one speaks with the company about its new adaptive communications services offering and the buzzwords begin to flow: Congeniality. Usability. Adaptability. Friendly.
To ADC, those terms all meant something in developing the company's new platform that it aims to be a service provider vehicle for a host of future applications, including unified messaging. Instead of figuring out how to make the technology work at any cost, ADC decided to focus on how to make workable a platform that people will use, and give service providers what it calls a means to reach customers across multiple market segments such as enterprises or telecommuters.
"We've heard from users. We've held focus groups trying to understand how people interface with the communications tools around them," says Dana Love, vice president of ADC's enhanced services unit. "We wanted to know where would they find value."
ADC thinks it knows the answer, and it's all about the unit's name--enhanced services. Minneapolis-based ADC formally launched its Broadband Services Platform (BSP) last week, the first product deployed by the enhanced services group under ADC's adaptive communications strategy.
The BSP technology is standards-based and designed to let service providers decide what services they want to offer as their market develops. It works across a wide breadth of wireless, wireline and ISP markets, and comes with a modular architecture enabling the service provider to pick and choose functionality. And the functionality comes fairly extensive.
According to ADC, the key to the BSP is the revenue-generating applications that it supports. Those include a unified message portal that lets users access voice and text messages through a single Web-based mail box; an Internet call manager that allows dial-up Internet users to monitor telephone calls while connected; a short messaging service SMS instant messaging application that sends text messages among any digital devices; a voice profile over Internet mail (VPIM) that lets service providers connect mail platforms from multiple vendors; and a voice vector that allows for remote access to voice mail via local numbers.
"We see this product as focusing on ICPs ... guys that are serving customers in all of the areas," Love said. "We're seeing all these service providers collapsing into ICPs."
ADC also argues that the BSP will help stressed-out carriers deal with the current difficult business environment by scaling to serve a variety of customers and by using Web-based interfaces for easy provisioning. Love even sounds Darwinian when he meets with potential customers, telling them "it's not the strongest that will survive, but the most adaptive."
Which leads back to ADC's core philosophy. The ability to retain customers across several market segments may be the key to service provider survival.
"The diversity of formats and the types of services required are causing significant uncertainty in the market," says Megan Gurley, a broadband analyst for The Yankee Group. "The increase of choices drives the need for a flexible, adaptable platform from which to make selections quickly."
William Stofega, an analyst that covers service providers for IDC, says a platform that makes the user-friendly promises like ADC's could definitely help struggling carriers.
"Go to someone like SBC's site and look at all the potential high-bandwidth services they say they're going to offer. So far, they really haven't come to fruition," Stofega says. "(ADC's) platform is something that could really have value for them."
The landmark launch for ADC's enhanced services group came just over nine months after the company completed the $200 million purchase of Centigram Communications, a unified messaging and call management firm that became the adaptive unit's backbone. After working together over the second half of 2000, the group finally went public again when it announced the adaptive communications initiative in February, then the BSP on March 27.
The BSP is now available for commercial shipment, and Love says several service provider customers should be announced later this year. Already, Indianapolis-based ICP eGIX has completed successful tests of the platform and will be ADC's first customer.
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