When things are going well, big bang transformation projects are not required and tw telecom has had it going well the last couple of years despite the horrendous economy. Harold Teets, senior vice president of Information and Network Technologies for tw telecom, who is leading for the network and IT efforts for the competitive carrier – and also delivering a keynote address at B/OSS Live! in June – spoke with Editor Tim McElligott about the importance of integrating these historically distinct groups and how they work to help tw telecom succeed. He also discussed his important new role on the Technical Advisory Council in the Office of Engineering and Technology at the FCC.
B/OSS: Why are both IT and Network under your leadership at tw telecom?
Harold Teets: We are making a strong statement organizationally but also it reflects the merging and converging of IT and network as the world moves from physical to logical and from a circuit-based view of the world to a services-based view. There it becomes a very natural overlap between the two disciplines. They are becoming so blurred it makes sense not just from a synergy point of view, but for the integration that comes from it. IT and the network are so intertwined, that the services you render from those two disciplines are becoming one.
Our IT organization is actually a customer of the network. They use the services we render. Having the two together is a natural for us because our customers also have their IT organizations and their network customer facing.
B/OSS: What is your position on Cloud services?
HT: Our business is enabling. We enable cloud providers; we are not a cloud provider. We don’t provide applications, we enable applications through whomever the cloud provider happens to be. That is an important consideration. You can have all the infrastructure, servers, databases and applications you want, but unless you have a reliable, dependable network that is also dynamic, you can’t really supply that cloud service. We are fundamentally a part of the cloud solution but we are not the cloud provider.
B/OSS: What is your buy-versus-build strategy?
HT: We buy for business parity and we build for competitive advantage. That’s the rule here but there are exceptions. Because of the need for time-to-market we do work with companies that already have packaged solutions, which we then alter for our needs. Customization is part of our vocabulary and the reality because we have some very critical business process and capabilities that are proprietary to us and are part of our ability to deliver services but maintain a good, strong customer experience.
B/OSS: You’ve had a good couple of years despite the economy. To what do you attribute that?
HT: A couple things. We stayed focus on a couple of very basic things. First was taking care of the customer because the customer experience drives everything, not only loyalty but also additional revenue. That’s one of the things we take great pride in – the experience. Go to any part of our company and you will find everyone has some impact to and from the customer. The second thing is that we continue to operate well. We invest wisely and we operate wisely and stay true to who we are. Those are the key points to our ability to be able to grow revenue and maintain our market position. Also, our vision statement – people working with people to change the way businesses connect and communicate – is more than words; it is truly part of our DNA. Of all the companies I have been with over my career, this is the one that has truly lived this and made it part of who we are and what we are trying to achieve.
