The Next Profitability Challenge: Enterprise Cloud

Sprint Enterprise Services case study

Sprint has been proactive in offering enterprises converged services such as cloud-based unified communications (UC), MPLS managed services and bring-your-own-device (BYOD) management for wireless services; its cloud-services portfolio is also growing at a fast clip. Sprint is working with partners to deploy SaaS and UC-as-a-service (UCaaS) while also preparing to launch IaaS for its business customers.

Five years ago Sprint’s network designs were created using spreadsheets, Visio diagrams and folders on shared drives. There were separate spreadsheets for each product and service, and lots of personal methods were employed.

Using these manual processes, implementation engineers or installers could make a change because of an outage, but the sales engineers wouldn’t know about it. Or a sales engineer might not update a spreadsheet to reflect what was actually deployed. It created a costly, error-prone mess, yet this is how most operators still run their business.

Sprint was at the forefront of transforming this inefficient system. It turned its enterprise sales organization into a lean machine by automating presales processes, resulting in impeccable designs and implementations.

Sprint has leveraged this successful transformation to sell cloud-based services — services that involve expanding partner ecosystems, more complex customer requirements, network-to-network interfaces and workflows, and a plethora of vendors and devices.

Automating the presales process

Sprint developed a complete system to streamline the creation of winning proposals and designs for end-to-end enterprise solutions. It intelligently combined its network services with data-center, cloud and virtualized offerings as well as with applications like UC. Key elements of this presales system include:

• generating existing deployment baselines to support up-sells and cross-sells;
• creating multiple scenarios that meet customer requirements;
• leveraging best practices and implementing them across the entire sales organization;
• facilitating collaboration between sales and back-office teams.

Sprint has automated the complex presales process and collaborative, end-to-end design process by using DesignXpert, a Netformx service-design product that produces validated architectures and winning proposals.

Conversation with Sprint’s Michael Fitz

We spoke with Michael Fitz, vice president of Solution Engineering and the Wireline Business Unit at Sprint, to find out exactly how his company has successfully automated the presales process.

Q: Mike, how has Sprint dealt with the dichotomy of custom orders versus economies of scale?

A: Netformx allows us to customize every deal. No two customers look alike in the combination of services they buy, how they are put together to create a solution, how they’re configured, the devices used, and where they reside. With Netformx we can customize a solution very efficiently and iterate it quickly with the customer. Plus, we know that the design will flow through our process in a [highly] automated way. No order fallouts, no crankbacks, no manual fixes, and no complaints to customer support. That allows us to meet the customer’s unique needs while at the same time run our business profitably and to scale.