Think of it as the David and Goliath story, only per-
formed in slow motion.
Christer Mattson knows firsthand the challenges of bidding out for new services with an old-school telephone company. As CEO of a small software firm with about 30 employees, Mattson understands the unhurried, deliberative processes a carrier moves through before selecting a system.
Mattson has also been on the receiving end of multinational rivals with big resources trying to knock down him and his company, King of Prussia, Penn.-based Codima Technologies ( www.codimatech.com), removing them from competition for that extremely lucrative carrier business.
“I can easily say that it’s a tough, bruising process,” says Mattson. “Our rivals the whole time were saying, ‘Why go with a small company?’”
Mattson evidently must be a glutton for punishment. When Dublin-based British Telecom Ireland approached Codima, the company was simultaneously negotiating with Avaya, Erickson, and Fujitsu. The BT Ireland team had spoken with another part of the British Telecom holding company, BT United Kingdom. BT UK had already deployed Codima’s network diagnostic tools and was pleased with the results.
Looming over the entire telecom industry was Cisco System’s insistence that every network box have a traceable serial number entry.
“It was a fairly severe requirement to have no grey boxes on the network. It meant visiting every customer,” says Tomás West, implementation and support manager for BT Ireland ( http://home.btireland.ie/echannel/corp.portal). West’s division handles VoIP and network convergence issues for Ireland, with BT also covering large parts of Europe and Asia.
BT Ireland did utilize a mixed product suite of network diagnostic tools, but West says the programs were not standardized and did not match the breadth and depth of Codima’s product line.
Codima’s software toolbox helps with VoIP management and actually maps out the network with Microsoft Office Visio. Here’s the cool part: Codima’s autoMap network visualization tool automatically draws the entire network, from operating systems to server ports to any device across an IP network right up to the customer premise copper. This is not a static map, laboriously drawn by engineers. It is a real-time snapshot for monitoring and diagnostics.
“This provides a great deal in one shot. It is most useful as
a discovery-process snapshot tool,” says West. “This gives us a very base standard reporting model to capture a customer’s inventory.”
He describes the tool as reliable and able to overcome standard network mapping challenges such as firewalls and WAN links.
Most of the meticulous vetting occurred on the BT UK side of the business. When BT UK’s think tank began bidding out its diagnostic tool, it had three basic requirements: scalability, the ability to handle convergence, and a reliable consulting tool. BT UK approached several of the biggest names in the industry and began a two-year discovery process in 2005.
“It was about as tough as you might think,” says Mattson, describing the typical challenges of any large organization. “Rigorous testing in labs, visits to customer’s sites, dealing with different offices, people being fired, key people being changed, you name it.”
Roughly 10 people from Codima participated in the development plan, with a changing set of roughly five people from the BT group. After giving Codima the green light, BT Ireland bought its first license in March 2007. Deploying the product was seamless, not disrupting the network.
“BT Ireland right away told us the product was appropriate to their needs,” says Mattson. “They told us the specific norms, went into our lab, and told us what they wanted.”
Mattson describes the Codima toolbox as both highly granular in its network mapping, able to capture small details, as well as scale up to one million users.
There was a two-day training seminar for six BT Ireland employees, all them Cisco-certified network professionals, followed by supplemental Web training and webinars.
For his part, West says BT Ireland will be able to charge consulting fees to its client base as a revenue stream and sell the diagnostic and mapping tools as a value-added service. BT has gained back a day from its typical on-property customer visits, with junior engineers troubleshooting and providing automated information for planning, auditing, and legal requirements.
“We’re able to make better recommendations to our customers as well as remove a great deal of grunt work for our engineers,” says West. “This complements the other tools we’re using on our networks.”
As for return on investment, West estimates BT will be able to recoup its investment within 12 months of deployment. V
Greg Tally can be reached at gtally@vonmag.com.
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