Last year, the telecommunications sector accounted for 10% of Digital Equipment Corp’s revenue – and the aim of the Maynard minimaker is to increase that to 20% over the next few years, says Antony Setchell, the company’s director of global telecommunications strategy. The powerhouse behind this growth? Facilities management. He reckons that it should contribute around 50% of the business of the telecommunications division eventually. It’s a practice that is rife in many industries where management is determined to concentrate on core activities and let others assume the burden of running their computer systems. None know that better than the companies in the telecommunications market itself, where a good living can be made by taking troublesome networks off a company’s hands. But the telecommunications market itself looks particularly promising, comments Setchell.
Bullish
It’s no surprise that he is feeling bullish; late last month DEC landed a $500m-plus 10-year contract from fledgling Australian operator Optus Communications Pty Ltd to build its Operational Support System – the software that handles everything from billing to fault reporting (CI No 1,956). It is the combination of old stagers and hopeful youngsters in the sector that makes it so promising. The new boys want to spend their time and energy on getting to market, the existing players …are locked into a mature system that chews up senior management time. He says the most significant change, however, is the way that senior management in the existing telecommunications industries are altering the way that they think of their businesses. In the quest to corner the facilities management market, DEC is employing a few unfamiliar techniques. For one thing, it has to overcome the natural scepticism of potential customers that perceive facilities management and systems integration as ways for computer manufacturers to try and sell their own kit through the back door. Setchell’s approach? I never talk about Digital products, he claims. Moreover, as a rule of thumb, he says that in any agreement around 50% of the kit should be non-DEC. It’s an approach that can have unsettling effect on some of DEC’s staff, and he acknowledges that …when you first do that, a country manager tends to go red in the face and say ‘you don’t really mean that do you?’ It can be seen how such an approach would aid the breaking of customer preconceptions about an equipment manufacturer but Setchell has other ways to try and break down the traditional roles.
By Chris Rose
He maintains that he dislikes the cost-plus approach to facilities management with its set monthly service charge. More interesting, he says, is a system whereby the money that DEC makes is linked in some way to customer revenues. That way, he believes, DEC staff have an incentive to keep producing the computer-based ideas to make the customer’s business more profitable. Just how interesting the customers have found it is more difficult to say, since details on who has plumped for which method of payment were not immediately available. Apart from building a new type of sales pitch, DEC is looking at building a new type of facilities management software. It’s early days – the work is still at the pre-architectural stage, says Setchell, but the plan is to produce something that will match the needs of the telecommunications operators early in the next millennium. Partly, this is simply a question of using new software techniques to build properly integrated systems, where existing ones are a series of separate point solutions, says Setchell, and the eventual fruit of DEC’s work should be an object-oriented set of applications that work together seamlessly. It’s a requirement that the telecommunications operators are becoming very keen on: when Nippon Telegraph & Telephone Corp proposed its Multivendor Integration Architecture earlier this year, which defines standard programming, human and transaction processing interfaces, it raised immediate interest from the rest of the industry. The Japanese phone compan
y introduced the concept because it wanted to buy in all its computers off the shelf Frather than continue to design its own and subcontract others to make them (it is barred from manufacturing on its own account or for anyone else).
Lights-out
But Setchell forsees wider changes – why, he asks, can’t you have a lights-out telecommunications operation in the same way as people talk about lights-out data processing operations? The trend, he believes, will be for the functions commonly associated with operational support systems to be pushed out gradually towards the user, so that, for example, end users can decide the format and itemisation of their bills by interacting directly with the public telephone operator’s computer systems. Already, in some niches, there are examples of this – British Telecommunications Plc provides managed network customers with a variable degree of control over their connections by giving them Concert network management workstations. Likewise the Switched Multimegabit Data Service definitions that Bell Communications Research is putting together places a fair degree of management control in the hands of the users. However, it is in the new mass telephony market that any new breed of facilities management software will be tested thoroughly. Portable numbering and intelligent networks mean that subscribers are going to become acquainted with the network as never before and it’s the management software that will have to cope. This could all have a rather pleasing symmetry to it. Who knows, in a few years all the telecommunications companies could have outsourced their computing requirements to the same computer companies that have chosen to outsource the running of their networks.
