To clarify this comment: "TSIS hired a new woman to train the baby Bells on how to use the software. That is why GTE did nothing for over 12 months."
I believe this is the "channel partner" program referred to in an earlier post. TSIS's strategy all along has been to sell their services to the wholesale phone company, who in turn resells it to *their* retail customer.
Hence, for Record and Replay for instance, TSIS sells its capability to AT&T who in turn marks it up and sells it to AT&T's customers as an AT&T-provided enhancement.
And, similarly, in the phone card activation arena, TSIS makes *one sale* to a phone card company, which in turn uses that capability to differentiate their product from all the other phone card companies when they sell to their customers.
But TSIS discovered several months ago that *some* of their wholesale clients were not properly explaining the TSIS part of the overall capability and were not "pushing" it to their customers. In my experience in the business world, this is not unusual -- products which tag along and for which there was no up-front cost often languish for not having an in-house sponsor (someone who is responsible for showing that they are, indeed, making a return on their investment). Since 'most all of TSIS's offerings are done with no up-front cost to the phone companies (for good and sufficient strategic reasons IMHO), there is not a natural internal sponsor in most cases.
So the channel partner program was set up to address these issues by assisting the phone companies to "push" the capability.
I view it as a positive, though the results will tell their own tale.
JSb |
