Some people may look at April 15, 2008, as a turning point for Covad Communications and indeed it was. The company was acquired by Platinum Equity that day and taken private. However, an important internal turning point came much earlier.
Somewhere between 2002 and 2004, Covad lost its mojo — or at least it had been lost by the group within the company that had to that point provided much of its differentiation: the Software Architecture and Delivery group. Unmesh Kulkarni, now the director of that group, was charged with getting it back.
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| Covad's Unmesh Kulkarni |
He took his master’s degree in computer science, his research experience in Europe and his fondness for software development and applied them to solving the problem of revamping a software architecture that had somehow gone from being cutting edge to serving as a costly and unwieldy barrier to innovation.
Unmesh was not a telecom guy when he came to Covad in 2005. That’s probably a good thing. “I wasn’t aware of how a lot of other telecoms worked, but then again Covad was not a typical telecom company,” he said.
Unmesh saw telecom more philosophically. “I saw it as an inflexion point between technology and human beings where you could take something from the networking world and make people’s lives more productive or exciting,” he said.
To make others’ lives better, the company needed to improve its own performance. It also had to cut its costs. Unmesh wasn’t unfamiliar with the Covad architecture, having worked with Persistent Systems as a consultant on various Covad projects, including work Covad was doing with the OSS/J Initiative, now part of the TM Forum. So he had an idea what might be required when the company decided it was time for an OSS transformation.
Unmesh is quick to point out that an OSS transformation does not necessarily refer to the wholesale swap of applications. “Transformation doesn’t come from replacing one vendor with another, but by putting in an architecture that helps you be agile or to change your network environment quickly,” he said.
Covad thought it had that architecture in place, being early to adopt a software-oriented architecture (SOA) in 2003. But as Unmesh said, sometimes when you’re on the cutting edge, you get cut. SOA products weren’t mature then. Standards were not in place. Proprietary middleware was causing inflexibility and too many interdependencies. Software maintenance and support were becoming cost-prohibitive. Licensing fees, complexity and integration challenges were unmanageable.
More important, the business had lost confidence in the IT department’s ability to deliver. Of the nine new OSS releases promised in 2005, the group missed the dates for six of them, came in on time with one and skipped the rest. At this point, Covad CIO Cornelia Pool set a strategic vision called "Building Agile Systems that Simply Work" and tasked the team with transforming the software department. “Our record till then was pretty abysmal. I knew that was not the way we wanted to do business,” Unmesh said. “So we turned it around.”
