ftth,
... will be used to interconnect electronically with SBC and Pacific Bell in order to automate the migration of customers to the WINfirst network ..."
This WINfirst development is remarkable if you think about it. What they are doing is the equivalent of what a federal mandate has stated all carriers do: inter-carrier "electronic bonding" of back office systems.
Electronic bonding amounts to hot links between competing operator's sytems. These are supposed to ensure that service orders and subscriber account information, such as directory numbers, names and addresses, etc. (it gets hairy, though, when you start looking at the data mining aspect of this for competitive and marketing advantage), can be exchanged in an automated fashion.
This, as opposed to using manual ordering processes such as telephone calls and faxed messages, which many operators still do in order to initiate and follow up on new service orders and conversions by customers who are dropping one provider in favor of another.
I think it's notable that WINFirst is doing this at such an early stage. Most established competitive carriers and MSOs (i.e., MSOs offering bundled voice with their data and video) are still struggling to achieve this level of automation through their older legacy platforms, most of which don't speak the same language even within the same shop!
But it figures, since WIN is going into this in a greenfield way, so if follows that they have nothing to convert from the old to the new. It's most interesting. So, it really doesn't pay to be first to market after all, if your stuff gets old fast. Unless you are first to the next generation of the same market. [What did he say?]
FAC |
