Pipeline Q&A: Vallent Corporation (formerly Watchmark-Comnitel)

This month's featured vendor is Vallent Corporation, the newly re-named venture resulting from Watchmark's acquisitions of Comnitel and Metrica. Vallent has been winning deals on the forefront of mobile service management in the United States , Europe and in the Asia-Pacific region and is among the leaders, if not the leader, in service quality management solutions for Tier 1 and 2 mobile operators. Pipeline had an opportunity to sit down with Lowell Anderson, vice president of Strategic Marketing for Vallent, to discuss the company's progress and the state of global markets for SQM solutions.

Pipeline: How has the Metrica acquisition gone for the people involved and is the assimilation process complete?

For us, there were strong business drivers for the acquisition, but we understand that realizing the value of those drivers has more to do with integrating people than anything. The whole management team has been involved with multiple acquisitions, so this integration has been a key focus for us.

We have gone though a process of integration in which we created cross functional and cross organizational intetgration teams to focus on common processes, consolidating product strategy, and working hard to understand each other's culture. We've also been working to put a management structure in place to support the goals of the business. We've worked hard to incorporate several former Metrica and Comnitel execs into highest levels of our team, as well as making sure we have strong Watchmark, Comnitel and Metica representation at all levels within our management staff.

This is not a situation where we're operating anything as a standalone business unit. We're operating as an integrated entity with management responsibilities across the whole business unit. Remember that we went through the Comnitel acquisition very successfully, and we think the Metrica people are now very comfortable. They were in a situation for seven months during which Metrica was for sale. They didn't know what company they'd be part of, so for them to become a part of Vallent was a relief for them to begin with. The work we've done to bring them in across our whole management layer has made them comfortable. This was not a take over, but a real merger.

I think the integration of the corporate identities is the next major step. We're creating a combined identity that will help the teams feel like members of a single organization, and that's the message we want our customers to receive.

Pipeline: Your recent KPN announcement was big news for your company. Please explain to our readers what the “group framework agreement” consists of and what it means to the kind of work you'll be doing with KPN?

In regards to the group framework agreement, consider that the KPN group includes KPN Netherlands, KPN Belgium and the E-Plus group in Germany . Through the group framework agreement they have agreed to terms of purchase for our SQM solution for the entire group. They are implementing it first in the Netherlands , but the other groups, including E-plus in Germany , now can move forward with our SQM solution as their solution of choice.

The benefit is that the engineering group at KPN Netherlands led the evaluation, but the engineering groups in E-Plus and in Belgium have been able to look at the product in action. When we go to deploy at E-Plus, for example, they won't have to go through another trial period. They can just move forward. We'll begin first with some of the GPRS services and migrate the solution forward to pick up additional services.

Pipeline: If there's a progression in terms of how carriers in general are adopting service assurance functionality, where are they today?

I think the market is moving itself to a situation where a lot of operators are starting to crystallize what they are doing in terms of their own quality management progression. If you look at SQM, even in that category there are layers of what the products can do. At a basic level they'll give you service specific quality reports and root cause analysis, but that ultimately moves across the entire organization which is trying to improve the whole customer experience.

So, the long term visions for SQM and service assurance are systems and tools that allow you integrate the whole organization toward a customer focus. That involves not just the tool, but process changes. This movement is from a service-specific analysis tool to an overall focus on customer quality. Given that, carriers are evaluating tools to meet the long term objective, but are working on deployments today to focus on delivering specific quality reports regarding specific services being delivered to specific customers.

As an example, today Blackberry service is a critical GPRS based service - maybe the most critical for these operators. We'll be launching a Blackberry service assurance product that will deliver Blackberry service quality reports directly to the operator. It's an application of our SQM platform, but targeted at a specific service. At AT&T Wireless, now Cingular, we put in a SQM system at a nationwide level to meet one of their customer's SLA requirements.

So the majority of what we see today is service specific reporting on the tools, and looking to rapidly perform root cause and identification on service degradation and deliver SLA reports regarding those services.

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