A swashbuckling pirate is the symbol of New Edge Networks, the Vancouver, Wash.-based CLEC that prides itself on doing things differently. A stroll through the company's offices — a series of open spaces created from a reclaimed warehouse and exotically decorated for a periodic company contest — is one visible sign of the New Edge difference. The labeling of its national network, dubbed BigFoot, is another.

Behind its exotic symbol and iconoclastic character, however, lies the real secret of New Edge's success, and it's something with considerably less sex appeal.

A pair of internally developed information processing systems is allowing this competitive carrier to provide network quotes, then design and turn up — in record time — networks that connect hundreds of small sites scattered about the U.S. Using its bulk qualification tool and a second process that quickly distills connection options into optimum solutions, New Edge has been able to post record sales and positive EBITDA numbers since May 2003.

In January, the company was able to turn up 298 Sbarro Italian restaurant locations with 60 days of signing a contract, after the company's previous service provider had failed to accomplish as much within six months.

Central to making a process like that successful is having a network such as BigFoot, which touches 9200 central offices (COs) in the U.S., reaching into 98% of all LATAs and passing 80% of all businesses. BigFoot includes New Edge's own network, built out in 583 COs mostly in the Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities the company initially set out to serve. It also includes lines leased and resold from all of the former Bell companies, Covad Communications, DSLNet and MCI Communications.

But to serve enterprise customers such as Sbarro, which has restaurants scattered throughout malls and shopping centers nationwide, what gives a network like BigFoot a real competitive advantage is the ability to know what facilities are available where — and at what price.

That task is the specific domain of Tom Hoesing, New Edge's director of sales engineering, and Carl Eshelman, a sales engineer for the carrier. They are jointly responsible for the internal sales tools that enable New Edge to move quickly to snap up customers while maintaining margins and service quality.

Hoesing, who has been associated with New Edge almost from its outset in 1999 — first as a supplier partner and then, for the past four years, as an employee — set out to determine how to more quickly deploy broadband networks based on BigFoot, the ever-expanding national footprint.

“Traditional systems for doing this didn't include speed,” Hoesing said. “So the first step was to create a bulk pre-qualification tool that could show us what's available within BigFoot quickly. We wanted to be able to put in up to 2000 addresses and, within 24 to 48 hours, find out what was available.”

Availability is just the first step, however, because Big Foot includes everything from New Edge's own DSL network, to DSL lines from other service providers, to ATM, to frame relay, to T-1, to private-line connections. Each has its own price points, efficiencies and capabilities. The tricky part was matching those capabilities to customer needs, said Eshelman, who created the second utility that has the ability to distill the bulk qualification list into something that matches the customer needs and generates a price quote.

“It's really the combination of two utilities of our very own that makes this work,” Hoesing said. “The first gives an overview of everything that's available — which is a lot — and a couple different carriers options and methods of access for every site, at least. The second tool is where we make decisions and narrow choices.”

New Edge doesn't sell directly to enterprises, working instead through 3500 channel partners, including value-added resellers, consultants and systems integrators. The company offers a Web portal where any of these partners can log on and enter customer information to be processed.

Much of the work New Edge does is in the retail arena, where it connects convenience store chains, clothing or other stores, gas stations or restaurant chains such as Wendy's and Metromedia Restaurant Group, which owns Bennigan's, Steak & Ale and Ponderosa Steakhouse. In 2004, the company helped establish the Retail Broadband Alliance, a forum designed to make it easier for retailers to bring broadband to their locations.

Many retailers don't need massive amounts of bandwidth, but they do need highly reliable broadband connections for point-of-sale transaction verification, inventory control, affinity and gift card authorization, as well as applications such as lottery number sales.

“The initial contact from a customer often comes through the channel partners, like the Retail Broadband Alliance,” Hoesing said. “The first discussion is around what they are trying to accomplish. What is driving this? Some don't really know much about broadband — they will have the concept of faster and cheaper. Others have in-depth experience that goes back years. Often they do have an RFP. We have a conversation about their priorities — reliability, availability, price, redundancy — because all of that affects what is the best option for them.”

The next step is to get the name, phone, address, state and ZIP code of each location.

New Edge can capture these from a Web site and frequently will encourage potential customers at trade shows to submit their locations on a CD to get a quote back within hours, Eshelman said.

“All we need is a tab-delimited text file, and we can get that in a myriad of formats,” he said. The information is then saved as an Excel spreadsheet and entered into the bulk pre-qualification tool (BPT).

“The back end takes the address and telephone number and does a couple of different look-ups,”Hoesing said. “It's looking for what's available in our network and is also integrated with our partner look-ups.”

In addition to scanning New Edge data, partner data and other carrier data, the tool also takes into account geographic data on the specific site.

“Most of our competitors don't do geographic look-up,” Eshelman said. That becomes important in order to be more precise in determining what kind of service is available and at what speed.

“Without that geographic information, the alternatives are a great big ‘maybe,’” Hoesing said.

The New Edge sales team then uses the BPT to generate two lists for each customer location: One is a multi-line result, listing all products and all speeds available to that site, and the other is a single-line result.

“The single-line result is our version of a broad-brush pre-qualification, with the phone number only and no speed or distance,” Hoesing said. “We use that as a backup — it is what they are likely being told by other providers.”

The next step is to take the multi-line result and get it down to a single preferred line per location, based on the customer's requirements.

“Typical retail customers have small transactions for POS or inventory control, but they want high reliability,” Eshelman said. “So we'd pick SDSL service because it's only 192 kilobits per second, but it has the highest SLA. The second choice would be IDSL, the third ADSL and finally, DS-1 or frame relay.”

As part of the second utility, the original BPT results are auto-filtered and sorted by connection types, starting with the preferred type. In this process, other customer requirements can be taken into account, such as a desire not to work with a certain company, Eshelman said.

Once the entire list of multiple connection types is assembled, with preferred ones listed at the top, the list is filtered again, this time via phone number, and pulls up unique references only, suppressing all second references, Eshelman said. The result is the list of each customer location with the best possible connection available, identified by carrier, service type and speed.

The New Edge sales team can then automatically price out each site option and generate a quote that can be presented to the sales channel partner and then to the customer. The result is something “that would take the customers days if not weeks and require them to contact seven different carriers,” Hoesing said.

The one customer site not part of the bulk quote is the host site, which the New Edge business development team takes care of, Eshelman said.

“Those sites are usually larger and with special needs,” he said. “They tend to be more expensive, so we want to shop those around to get the best price.”

New Edge's motto is “Faster, farther, smarter,” and its automated tools certainly fit that bill. Being able to render national quotes quickly is more important to the company as its original business — bringing broadband to Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities — is increasingly more competitive.

“The Bell companies are catching up there,” said New Edge President and CEO Dan Moffat. “We know we have to keep working to making our processes better. At any given time, we have to be using the best possible data. If a Bell company is adding DSL or if they are taking fiber out, we need to know that.”

Moffat still likes to keep the New Edge spirit, however. So, in negotiating the Sbarro deal, the company threw in a twist, requiring the food chain to supply 10 pizzas each Friday for a year if the CLEC met its ambitious connection targets.

New Edge got its pizzas, though initially there was one problem.“We forgot to negotiate toppings,” Eshelman said. “So the first pizzas were all just cheese.”

Serving Joe's

To allow me to see the New Edge sales utilities in action, Carl Eshelman and Tom Hoesing created a phony potential customer, charmingly named Joe's Morgue and Ice Cream Saloon, with 144 locations nationwide.

“That's typical for most of our customers,” Eshelman said. “They have sites scattered all over.”

Starting with the list of 144 sites, with address and phone number, Eshelman first ran the bulk pre-qualification tool, then the distilling utility, to generate the list of best options for each site and the price. Even stopping to answer questions, the process took less than an hour. “A manual process like this would have taken our sales team hours to finish,” he said.

There are still options the customer can consider that will raise or lower the price, including installation alternatives, whether or not they want a managed service, the number of IP addresses needed at each site and the need for a dial-up backup line.

“I know they say that necessity is the mother of invention, but I believe laziness is,” Eshelman said. “We had to create this because we didn't have any other tools to get this work done.”

New Edge gets 10 to 15 new groups of requests a day for up to 2000 sites each, so rapidly responding would require many personnel hours to handle.

“In addition, the tool flows into the back office to bring orders directly into our back office without having to rekey the entries,” Hoesing said. “That increases our speed in turning up service and our precision.”
— Carol wilson