This is the story of how a service is born. Spanning a little more than six months, it reveals not only the intricacies of introducing a new offering, but also a unique and refined process for doing it and the speed and efficiency with which it can be accomplished.

The service is Broadwing Communications' voice-over-IP Integrated Access product for large enterprise customers, which the carrier is launching this week. While that is important because it marks a major step in Broadwing's VoIP evolution, this story is more about process — a process that is applied to all new service introductions that come out of Broadwing. It's about what happens behind the scenes: the creative process, the technology evaluation, the network integration, the market evaluation and the decision-making that comprises the introduction of a new service. It's an exclusive look inside what one company executive calls the Broadwing “machine” that has been tuned to help expedite the process of service introduction and ensure the success of the applications it produces.

Broadwing, it's important to note, is not new to VoIP. Even as it has gone through the extensive process of developing the integrated access product that forms the first part of an ultimate suite of VoIP products it will sell directly to enterprise customers, the carrier has established itself as a VoIP enabler for other service providers.

“Anyone that's a voice-over-IP provider today probably buys some services from us,” said Mark Pugerude, Broadwing's senior vice president of marketing and business development. “If voice over IP is like mining for gold, we're the ones selling pick axes to everybody. We've been selling pick axes to companies like Vonage and Covad and others, and we've learned a lot in helping those companies develop their systems and processes to get that done.”

Those pick axes are components like phone numbers, public network connectivity, local number portability (LNP) services, E911 services and other elements that smaller entities require to successfully sell VoIP services, Pugerude said. But in the process of helping others, Broadwing also identified a market for its own VoIP offering for enterprises — specifically those with dispersed branch offices and varying levels of IP maturation in their networks.

“Our enterprise customers, which comprise 60% of our revenue, were saying they needed to get into the VoIP space but they didn't want to spend a lot of money and wanted to have investment protection,” Pugerude said.

That feedback from Broadwing's enterprise customers marked the beginning of the process Broadwing uses for all of its new product development. It is a five-step process — concept, assessment, design, development and launch — originally developed by Harry Lalor, product marketing executive, who came to Broadwing by way of the company's acquisition of Focal Communications.

“As the companies came together, it made sense to create a common product development process that the combined company could use,” Lalor said.

The process worked, Pugerude said, because it could be applied to any product development effort, because it helped everyone involved to understand who was saying what and because it put everything on the table from the outset so that everyone knew what the intentions were.

“It was so that there would be witnesses and to make sure that what was put in at the beginning was what was coming out at the end,” Pugerude said.

Of course, market conditions and the technological condition of Broadwing's network — particularly in the wake of the Focal acquisition and the combination of Broadwing's assets with Focal's — also played a role in the timing of the company's decision to pursue the Integrated Access product launch and overall entry into enterprise VoIP services.

“Our plant was an ideal candidate for VoIP, being an all-optical network with the latency required for VoIP,” said David Huber, chairman and CEO of Broadwing. “Part of the reason we can drive new products to market quickly is the underlying technology. We have one network built on an all-optical core.”

The five-step process, combined with Broadwing's assets, helped the company not only get to market quickly with a competitive service but also ensured that the service was a good market fit.

“The VoIP product offers people so many more features that we really had to get to market to be competitive,” said Scott Widham, Broadwing's president of sales and marketing. “Customers are saying the time is right. We're putting the capital and systems behind this so we can launch it on time.”

“I think the whole enterprise market is in play right now because of VoIP,” Lalor said. “With the whole converged network opportunity, as well as companies looking at their PBXs and whether they should converge their voice and data networks, it allows Broadwing to address every enterprise in the country and puts us on equal footing with the big guys.”

One industry analyst said the timing of Broadwing's entry with an integrated access product makes sense given the state of enterprise decisions regarding VoIP and Broadwing's experience.

“When you look at enterprise VoIP services, the market is still so price-driven, so the number one reason to go to VoIP is to get down the cost of the overall connection” said Diane Myers, senior analyst for Stratecast. “If a carrier can get a customer with a trunking or integrated access solution, it will give them a base to upgrade to different services — and in the meantime, it will allow business customers to maintain the investment they already have at the customer premises.”

The starting point for the creation of Broadwing's VoIP Integrated Access product was November 2004, at a monthly concept meeting where the senior execs of the entire company and key contributors go over concepts — a meeting that marks the beginning of the company's five-step process. Typically at Broadwing, concepts for new offerings come from multiple directions: interpretation of market demand and the reaction of customers, the marketing and sales departments, engineering and sales engineering or the executive suite.

“Concepts can come in from all different parts of the company, but they coalesce in product management and product marketing,” Pugerude said. What's unique, he said, is how the company garners the information, makes decisions about proceeding and moves (or doesn't) quickly into the assessment phase.

“We get lots of concepts, but not everything makes the cut to get into assessment,” Pugerude said.

Along the way, the evaluation of a concept is very much a group process.

“In my mind, one of the great things about this company is that the conceptual and assessment process is everybody,” said Scott Kell, the carrier's vice president of engineering. “It's not just someone in marketing saying ‘Here's my concept.’ We feed back through each other constantly.”

There were myriad sources for what ultimately became Broadwing's VoIP Integrated Access product, Pugerude said.

“The concept came from knowledge of the VoIP marketplace,” he said. “Sales and sales engineering were saying that we should develop something in this space for branch location applications. And in marketing, we started to see IP Centrex doing heavy lifting in a lot of areas but people making choices not to get into it. The overwhelming response from customers was that they didn't want to spend a lot of money on capex for brand new builds for IP PBXs, but they did want some of the features of IP and an IP telephony road map.”

The monthly meeting is Broadwing's virtual incubator for new ideas — the place where concepts either get blessed and immediately move forward or get left on the table. That kind of efficiency is unique in the telecom realm, where confusion and delay is often the norm.

“What's nice about it is that it's regular, it's automatic and it includes all buy-in from all the executive teams,” Pugerude said. “It takes some discipline to do that, but it's great because Dr. Huber believes in this top-down philosophy of getting everyone's buy-in on new product concepts and assessment.”

If an idea passes through Broadwing's concept phase — getting the buy-in of the company's sales, marketing, engineering, operations and IT departments, as well as senior executives — then it moves to the assessment phase.

“Once we get out of concept, and marketing has written up a product requirement document, we start to put it into the Broadwing machine,” Pugerude said. “That's where engineering and project management and IT all start to weigh in.”

A critical cog in the Broadwing machine is the company's project management department, led by Vice President Bob Olsen, which is responsible for overseeing a project from the point the concept is approved to the time the service is launched.

“Bob's team is a central repository for cross-functional resources — they're cross-functional quarterbacks,” said Tim Naramore, Broadwing's chief information officer. “That position was really something genius that was put in place.”

The project management department reports not through engineering or product marketing, but through operations. It's that distinction that many Broadwing executives view as the most unique component of Broadwing's approach.

“I've seen us try to have engineering run the project, and I've seen us try to have marketing run the project,” Kell said. “I'll be as self-deprecating as I can be: I suck at it. I can't do it, and having Bob's team do it is one of the most amazing things I've seen.”

“Normally, most carriers would have that function in product management, and what that does is pulls product managers away from actually defining the market,” Pugerude said. “With Bob's group managing it, my product managers can keep focused on the market and market dynamics. It really keeps us focused on customers and customer demands in the marketplace.

Olsen's project management team tracks the minutiae of all product introductions, creating the schedules and making sure they are adhered to so that services are launched according to plan, at cost and with all the necessary components in place. Here again, the process is collaborative and all-encompassing.

“Because my group has the ability to see in all product development initiatives, we can work with individual departments and make sure that when we work out the schedules, they're realistic, and we have everybody's buy-in,” Olsen said. “One of the reasons we're as successful as we are, and I think we'll continue to be, is that rather than putting this stuff together in a vacuum, we go out of our way to pull in all the departments, regardless of the level of involvement they're going to have. If they have some skin in the game, they are involved upfront and really have the opportunity to voice any potential constraints they may have and really get them out on the table.”

The Broadwing department that has perhaps the most skin in the assessment part of the game is engineering, which is responsible for all technology selection and purchasing. Speed was the overwhelming theme of the assessment phase of the VoIP Integrated Access rollout: The technology assessment was completed just about two months after the project was approved, in part because of what already existed in the network and because the product is the first component of a suite of VoIP services the company plans to launch.

“We had some legacy Focal assets that we were able to leverage and that we'll be leveraging even more going forward, so that reduced the time frame somewhat,” Kell said. By the end of 2004, he said, the company had chosen Broadsoft's platform to supply switching, call routing and feature functionality and had deployed the system in Broadwing's labs in Chicago and Austin, Texas, for testing.

“We chose Broadsoft for a number of reasons. From an engineering perspective, we thought the call routing capabilities were a lot better. We liked the architecture better,” Kell said. “I personally don't like to go out and spend a ton of time testing everybody that's out there. It's more an art than a science sometimes when you're trying to get services to market.”

Broadwing did conduct a paper evaluation of all available technologies, Kell said. “But you have to pick a couple and go with your strong suits,” he said. “It's no different as we look at session border controllers for other strategic reasons, which we're in the middle of right now.”

That speed of decision-making and deployment is a critical part of Broadwing's character, said Mike Jones, Broadwing's chief technology officer, who Pugerude referred to as “the truth detector for concept through development.”

“We're set up as an organization in such a way that religious views don't get to last forever,” he said. “What gets in the way of getting products out the door is that we all have opinions. Here, the people best qualified to make the decisions make them.”

The pace with which the company was able to make technology decisions for its VoIP rollout is also attributable to the company's experience working with other carriers on their own VoIP deployments, which allowed Broadwing to glean what worked and what didn't, Pugerude said.

“We've been working with every VoIP carrier out there, who has already made these technology choices,” he said. “We've made their stuff work on our network, so that gives us another leg up that a lot of our competitors don't have. It's like when you become a star overnight, but it took you five years to get there: We made a decision in two months, but it took us three years to get there.”

During the assessment phase, as it puts together the project plan for the service's rollout, Olsen's project management team is also compiling and fine-tuning the financial budget. Budgets are approved during the buy-in that accompanies concept approval, but those commitments are confirmed during assessment.

“One of the things we do before we get too far down in the process is go back and re-educate the executive team from a financial standpoint,” Olsen said. “We go back through the architecture, the cost, the time frame — it's really just sort of a sanity check.”

Olsen and his project managers also compile the core team for the project, which spans marketing, engineering, operations, installation, IT, finance, legal and customer care. Members of that team are involved from the outset as Olsen's team lays out an extraordinarily detailed schedule, which can include literally thousands of tasks.

“When we first started doing this, people were skeptical, but now it's sort of proven itself out,” Olsen said. “I'm a firm believer that the more effort you put in upfront, the higher your chances of success.”

This is the extremely granular part of the process, in which the team meets with all departments involved to educate them on their role and fine-tunes the business case and financial model in the process. The team also looks at any additional resources or training that must be brought in to complete the task.

“The goal is to walk out the other end of this with a very detailed, realistic and complete project plan and associated financial plan,” Olsen said.

As that plan is completed, Broadwing's engineering department is entering the design phase, locking down the architectural requirements for the product.

“The creation and the finalization of the product requirements document is the launch of design,” Kell said. “After the vendors have been selected, we actually lay out the network on paper.”

In the case of the VoIP Integrated Access offering, the selection of Broadsoft as a vendor was part of a plan to quickly expand into new service offerings based on the same underlying platform.

“The design phase for this was longer than it might typically take because we're going to be leveraging a lot of the same assets for future products,” Kell said. “We bought this Broadsoft cluster, and we're going to be using this piece for this product and this piece for that product, but it's all going to be the same trunking connected to the same switches connected to the PSTN.”

“They realized that our stuff would give them the ability to not get stuck — that they could meet all their different needs with a single platform,” said Scott Wharton, vice president of marketing for Broadsoft.

Even with those advantages, Kell said, the design phase was completed in about 30 to 45 days, with minimal alterations in the planned architecture. “The minutiae of the design changed a couple of times, but that was mainly logical changes, not physical changes,” he said.

Here again, the company's project management function reveals itself as almost a secret weapon. The fact that Olsen's group is answerable to operations and connected to the company's bottom line gives project management far more ownership of new initiatives than it would have otherwise.

“To me, one of the beautiful things about our whole process is that Bob's group reports through operations,” Kell said. “Given that, they're the ones that are completely and totally affected by everything done by us. We cause all the problems, and we have to help them figure out how to fix them — and they have to live with them sometimes.”

The resulting architectural outline is then posted to an internal system for everyone involved to see and review. The engineering staff links the architecture back to the product requirement document so that anyone reviewing it can understand why engineering did certain things, Kell said.

“We try to make sure marketing-ese and engineering-ese are linked together to make it possible for everyone to understand what's going on,” he said. “After the architecture is on paper, we begin the exit design phase. Then we have a kickoff call with Bob's team to develop the product.”

Development, being the last phase before service launch, might seem like the most critical, but in Broadwing's process, there has been so much cross-functional involvement leading up to this point that virtually all problems have been resolved.

“The worst thing that could happen is that we develop this in a vacuum, it gets thrown over the fence to operations and they now have a new network they have to manage and maintain or a new set of customers calling in with tech issues they haven't experienced before,” Olsen said. “Although some people may question the logic of it, it's worked well to get operations involved very early in the project, even if they might not have anything to do for two or three months. The value is that they can predict or see potential issues or roadblocks as we're developing this thing, rather than being handed it and saying, ‘if you'd only done this part differently.’”

The development phase consists of weekly core team meetings of one hour per week that gauges status of various tasks and helps various departments in any areas they may need assistance.

“The value of the core team meeting is that it forces everyone to get together at least once a week to focus specifically on this development effort,” Olsen said. “It allows us to address any issues or suggestions in real time.”

During this period, Olsen also has weekly status meetings in which he briefs executives on all ongoing projects. “That's a chance for the senior and middle management team to see all the projects at a pretty granular level,” he said.

It's also during the development phase that both alpha and beta trials are conducted. For VoIP Integrated Access, Broadwing started an internal alpha trial on Feb. 7 of this year between facilities in Columbia, Md., and its headquarters in Austin.

“There were some processes that had not been completed, so we did the alpha to verify the testing we'd done in the lab and test the initial processes,” Kell said. “We set up certain people with the ability to use the service and put together an instruction set for how to use it. It was primarily executives in the company — we wanted to demonstrate our ability to execute as well as show that the feature set that's part of marketing was actually there.”

Perhaps owing to the intricate process leading up to availability of service, very little was changed as a result of those trials, Kell said.

“I believe we really only had one request that led to a configuration change to what we deployed in the field,” he said. “It had to do with the dB levels on the voice itself. It wasn't loud enough.”

As the development phase gives way to launch, the involvement of both Kell's and Olsen's teams begins to taper off. By this point, Olsen's team has worked backward from a general availability (GA) launch date (in the case of VoIP Integrated Access, June 6) to incorporate marketing and components like sales training into the schedule.

“When we say GA, that means it's 100% ready to go,” Olsen said. “There's a graceful handoff where marketing becomes more of the forefront, and we sort of step back at that point. “The handover is almost anti-climactic.”

As the finished product has emerged from the development process, Pugerude and his team do one final check to compare planned pricing of the product offering against the carrier's capex spending, as well as the current dynamics of the market. They also complete marketing and public relations activities, organize regional “lunch and learn” programs for enterprise chief information officers and IT directors and complete education for both Broadwing's internal sales force and its agents and VARs on the product. After that, all that's left is to start turning up customers.

By this point in the process, Kell and his engineering team already have moved on to the next project. “Being antsy by nature, I can start to see where we're not needed any more and will start talking about the next project,” he said.

For competitive reasons, Broadwing is keeping mum on its next steps in the enterprise VoIP realm, but it's not difficult to see a logical progression. The carrier's VoIP Integrated Access product is well-suited for enterprises that are perhaps not quite ready to make a complete immersion into VoIP, but the way Broadwing has structured the service and the supporting technology it's using will let it move customers very quickly into more complex and complete VoIP packages.

“Since everyone knows VoIP is hot but still in the early stages of deployment, an integrated access product is an easy way for enterprises to get comfortable with it,” said Broadsoft's Wharton. “They're using their IP backbone to go upstream and go after these multi-site companies, and no one else is really going after it that way in that market segment. Once people feel comfortable, it becomes easier to upsell to other things — PBX deployments, for example.”

Indeed, Pugerude said Broadwing is very confident about its ability to quickly gain a foothold in the large enterprise sector using its VoIP Integrated Access product as an entree — and that it's only one element of a plan to turn Broadwing's experience in — and understanding of — VoIP opportunities to take Broadwing's customers to the next level of network capabilities.

“VoIP Integrated Access is custom-built for helping our Fortune 1000 customers in their branch office locations — this is true VoIP at the customer prem,” Pugerude said. “We've been able to mature and help our customers, through the maturation process of voice over IP.”