With a full quarter at UDP now under his belt and fresh from an 1,100 mile road trip through Texas, UDP vice president of sales and business development, Doak Field, talks with Billing & OSS World editor Tim McElligott at the COMPTEL PLUS Convention & Expo about his new role and applying his experience to this new “field” of business and operations support systems.
Doak will help formulate and implement UDP’s sales and marketing strategies and identify ideal matchups between the company’s suite of services and the needs of its customers. He’ll also be taking the company’s message all around the country.
Tell us about your background.
I joined the industry in 1989 with MCI in the days of the long-distance ward. I spent 14 years in those long-distance trenches, mostly with MCI — right up to the point Bernie Ebbers ruined it. I also spent three years at Sprint and multiple years at AT&T. I came here from Time Warner Cable where I spent the last five years.
What’s the biggest difference between the cable companies and the telephone companies?
I cut my teeth with MCI as they were riding that wave with Bill McGowan and that group was very aggressive and very nimble. When I came to Time Warner Cable, the president asked me what I thought about what they were doing and I told him they were going to fail miserably. They weren’t geared up to compete in the business arena. They were a residential-minded company trying to compete in a business arena and there you can’t tell people you will be out sometime between 8 a.m. and 5 p.m. It just won’t work.
Lo and behold they gave me the job. My first act was to change that cable mentality and now that I am no longer there I am still not certain they fully get it.
And what is your first task at UDP?
My job is to expand our reach geographically, but also product-wise. UDP has not been that aggressive, to my knowledge, in marketing ourselves nationwide. People outside the Texas boundaries may never have heard of us, but we have quite a few customers outside the state.
