It’s not every day a new vendor launches in telecom’s software sector, or even every year. It is even less often that one starts life with eight years experience supporting a $600 million service provider. But such was the official birthing of Cycle30 this month.
Cycle30 Inc. is a wholly owned subsidiary of GCI, the largest telecommunications company in Alaska. After supporting a major transformation of the service provider’s business and operations support system infrastructure and its IT department for the last eight years, Cycle30 will operate on its own as a provider of an end-to-end, order-to-cash solution.
Cycle30 will offer hosted solutions for billing, ordering management, provisioning, mediation and revenue assurance functions for mid-tier telecom, cable and utility operators in North America. The company’s president, James Dunlap, is currently GCI’s chief information officer. He and his team have been working together for the last six to eight years. The company’s 70-plus employees work primarily in either service delivery or professional services such as implementation, custom work and project development. Half the employees are either in Seattle or Denver, while the rest work remotely or in the disaster recovery center in Scottsdale, Ariz., or in the On-Demand Center in Philadelphia.
“We don’t believe in or operate in a centralized environment,” Dunlap said. “I am a strong believer that if you hire the right people you don’t have to put them all in the same office.”
The company’s primary billing partner is Comverse, which has developed a hosted version of its product. The Comverse ONE Billing and Active Customer Management solution has a single data model, a single product catalog and an open framework that has been recognized in the market as a top solution for converged billing, which is something Cycle30 and GCI know a lot about because GCI is a multi-technology provider of telecom, cable and wireless services.
Cycle30 also partnered with TOA Technologies for its SaaS Mobile Workforce Management Platform. TOA provides a mission-critical mobile workforce management component, which accurately predicts appointment times, automates scheduling and routing in real-time, and manages customer communications to proactively update subscribers with their appointment status.
Yuval Brisker, CEO of TOA Technologies, said that by offering a complete system that manages operations end-to-end, his company can provide mid-tier cable and broadband operators with a powerful platform and a full spectrum of tools for revolutionizing customer care while also reducing expenses.
Its hosting partner is Sunguard. Dunlap called it one of the top-tier data center companies in the U.S.
Dunlap also said that after 11 years working at Nordstrom, customer service has become part of his DNA, which is why this is one of the company’s first announced partnerships. “We talk about customer service differently from anyone else because we think that it is a distinguishing characteristic that no one else in this sector even keeps in mind,” he said. “We have been a customer of hosted solutions in the past (as part of GCI) and we have not seen a lot of customer-service focus in the market.”
He also said too many players lack the end-to-end capabilities his offering provides. “Providers today are either selling a piece of software to you or operating a piece of software for you, but rarely does that encompass a full end-to-end, order to cash solution that an operator requires to run the business,” Dunlap said.
Greenfield operators, rural wireless providers or startups with no back-office infrastructure of their own are ideal targets for Cycle30. The company will target operators with 1.5 million subscribers or less and also will target utility and power companies. “They are woefully underserved,” Dunlap said. “With all the advances in the utility sector with smart grid and power generation technology, there will be great demand for billing for that usage.”
