The seventh house
By Tim McElligott
Just when you thought the stars were aligned for OSS vendors to begin reaping the rewards of surviving the downturn by streamlining their businesses, along comes a report from Insight Research...
Consolidation only the first step
By Carol Wilson
The telecom industry has been ripe for consolidation for some time, so there is little reason to bemoan the rapid pace at which bigger service providers have been swallowing smaller service providers for the past 18 months...
Distress call
By Ed Gubbins
It's hard not to smirk reading that former CEO Frank Dunn is suing Nortel Networks, claiming the board wrongfully fired him in 2004...
Merger fallout
By Kevin Fitchard
There's a downside to mergers, and Sprint is learning that lesson the hard way...
Whacking weeds
By Dan O'Shea
It's spring again time to clean that back yard and pull the weeds that have started to pop up amid the daffodils and tulips...
Serge wins the skunk hunt
By Ed Gubbins
Last summer Alcatel CEO Serge Tchuruk shrugged off the suggestion that large-scale consolidation among big telecom equipment vendors was long overdue...
Sellution
By Tim McElligott
Telution was one of those independent software companies born of the boon years between 1996 and 2000 (1998 to be exact) that one really wanted to see make it...
Currying favor
By Dan O'Shea
One of the residual concerns in the wake of AT&T's announcement that it will acquire BellSouth has been the future of Qwest. Often forgotten by people who viewed big telco competition only as AT&T vs. BellSouth vs. Verizon, Qwest seems to have disappeared even further into the background...
Who's in charge?
By Vince Vittore
Cisco Systems and Scientific Atlanta made it official yesterday, closing their multi-billion dollar merger to create what amounts to one big headache for Alcatel, Tellabs, Siemens, Nortel/Huawei, Lucent or any other big access player with designs on being a primary provider in the IPTV world...
Limit executive pay to calm investors
By Ed Gubbins
Annual shareholder meetings are a hoot. Though they start out like analyst earnings calls (financial reports, strategic overviews, etc.), things really heat up in the Q&A sessions...
Lucent retirees fight back
By Ed Gubbins
At Lucent Technologies' annual shareholder meeting this week, the message was clear: Valentine's Day is over. Before successfully pushing through two proposals to restrict executive pay, shareholders lambasted Lucent executives and directors for everything from breaking pension promises to the fact that Lucent's stock is no longer at $80 or $100 per share, as it was in the late 1990s...
Men are from routers, women are from servers
By Tim McElligott
The call for a customer-focused, service-centric approach to operations management grows louder every day. Changing the mindset of network troubleshooters so that it reflects the new focus on services rather than network elements won't be easy. But then again, not all minds are created equal...
Going steady
By Ed Gubbins
Lucent Technologies' move to acquire Riverstone Networks gives it a quick jump toward the front of the line in the carrier Ethernet equipment market. According to Infonetics Research, Riverstone was second only to Cisco Systems in the 2004 global carrier Ethernet equipment market...
Call me Ishmael
By Ed Gubbins
Plenty of questions swirl around the surprise news today of Broadwing CEO David Huber surrendering his crown. A spooky-smart scientist, Huber has long been regarded as the Captain Ahab of all-optical networks...
Talent at the top
By Ed Gubbins
Recent bad news from Lucent Technologies has employees and analysts thinking about the possible need for big changes at the company. Should Lucent overhaul its product portfolio or its management team or both? ...
Back in time?
By Jason Meyers
The news this week that McLeod has emerged from Chapter 11 and named Royce Holland its new CEO elicited some different reactions, at least around here. To me, it offered a shred of hope that maybe there's some promise yet for the competitive telecom business...
Merger fever still contagious
By Carol Wilson
Expect more mergers in 2006, especially in the telecom vendor segment. Clifford Holliday, principal in B&C Consulting and author/analyst with Information Gatekeepers Inc., includes that prediction among his top 10 for the upcoming year...
Running the numbers
By Vince Vittore
A good friend of mine had a grandmother who owned a bar in Pennsylvania coal country. This isn't the beginning of a joke. Really. Her job, besides lightening the wallets of miners on Friday night by filling them up with booze, was running a lottery of sorts, a numbers game....
Regime change
By Ed Gubbins
Corporate management churn reached a seven-month high this month, according to data released this week...
Rising tide
By Tim McElligott
Can a rising tide really raise all boats? Satyam Chairman B. Ramalinga Raju addressed the crowd at TeleManagement World last week and said, yes, it could--and should...
IPTV: Early results positive
By Teresa Mastrangelo, Principal Analyst, BroadbandTrends.com
Unlike voice over IP and even broadband in general, operators worldwide are equally embracing IPTV as a means to increase the average revenue per user....
Capitalizing on IPTV revenue
By Vince Vittore
Economics 101 teaches the average high school senior that there are two things that drive Wall Street...
Bermuda shorts
By Ed Gubbins
In August, I was talking to an analyst who covers Nortel about the equipment vendor's corporate identity and culture. I asked what we might conclude about the culture of Nortel from the abrupt resignations of former Cisco executives Gary Daichendt and Gary Kunis, who were named COO and CTO, respectively, in April and left three months later...
Time for a reshuffle
By Vince Vittore
Big changes are afoot in the access market, and they couldn't come at a more opportune time. As carriers gear up for their smackdown with cable operators, they're spending more and more money in the sector...
Covad looks to the sky
By Kevin Fitchard
You have to give Covad Communications credit. It and its CEO Charlie Hoffman won't go away. Just when the economy or the government throws another obstacle in its path, the company somehow manages to find a new path...
