Suddenlink: A Cable Company With an Acquiring Taste

Suddenlink Communications looks like a company that’s biting off more than it can swallow. The cable operator, which was founded in 2002, has added subscribers at a gluttonous rate since 2006, pacing the technology changes of a sector moving beyond video to voice and high-speed data in an increasingly aggressive and competitive space.

This kind of pace would choke the most seasoned IT professional, but for Bob Putnam, Suddenlink’s senior vice president and CIO, it’s just another day on the job.

“It has been a challenge,” he admitted, “but the senior team that we brought into the IT organization ... had that same mindset and ability to grow as the company grows.”

And grow the company has. Starting in 2002 as Classic Cable, serving small towns and rural communities with few enhanced services, the company became Cebridge Connections in 2003. From May 2006 through the present, the St. Louis-based Cebridge, which changed its name to Suddenlink, acquired 900,000 South-Central U.S. subscribers from Cox Communications and 240,000 West Virginia subs from Charter Communications to become a top 10 U.S. cable broadband provider with more than 1.3 million households.

Suddenlink History and Milestones

“Our largest markets are a system that includes Charleston, Beckley and Parkersburg, W.Va., and then a North Carolina system that includes Rocky Mount, New Bern and Greenville,” said Corporate Communications Director Gene Regan.

Hardly NFL cities, and while even the NBA might not locate a franchise in those areas, they’re the perfect places for an aggressive cable operator that brings a bundle of services that subscribers are hungry for.

“We think that we are very well positioned to be one of the few, if only, providers of a truly integrated triple play of data, video and phone from one company over one bill,” said Putnam.

Most others are established operators that have all the pieces in place, not relative newcomers who keep adding pieces on the fly. That’s what makes Suddenlink’s business so unique: it can deliver the latest services while constantly adding customers. It has grown its voice customer base from 30,000 in 2007 to nearly 150,000 today.

“It goes back to making sure there is a business and IT alignment,” Putnam said. “I am very much involved in the due diligence and the integration strategy that will need to be done to get them in [alignment] as seamlessly as possible.”

Seamless integration in the cable space ain’t what it used to be.

“Video has its complexities, but as you get into more advanced services with [high-speed data] and [voice], the complexity rises exponentially,” he said. “You have to have a clear plan as you’re going through the due diligence process of what it’s going to take to integrate these companies and not have customer disruption.”

Suddenlink throws integration responsibility to a Program Management Office, which works across departments internally as well as with incoming acquisitions and vendors who are supplying gear to the whole shebang.

“If it’s a large acquisition, we will bring in outside help as part of our Program Management Office,” he said.

For the most part, though, the PMO oversees in-house interdepartmental cooperation and outside relationships with key vendors like billing provider Convergys; OSS/mediation tool provider Sigma Systems; and phone platform provider Nortel.

“It’s a very closely coupled relationship with the engineering group and the IT organization,” Putnam said.

It helps that Suddenlink has its own national backbone so when there’s an acquisition — and there is always another acquisition — the platform can roll without disrupting subscribers.

“There’s a detailed plan of what we need to do in order to get them on common platforms,” Putnam said. “If we have a system that we’re acquiring in Arkansas or on the East Coast somewhere, our challenge would be what to leave the same and then migrate post-acquisition or what needs to be migrated at the time of the acquisition.”

System management responsibility is shared between the St. Louis headquarters, a NOC in Tyler, Texas, and each region. But “as an IT organization, we have enterprise systems that run centrally ... all out of the St. Louis data center,” said Putnam.

While there are probably easier ways to make a living than assuring every facet of an always-evolving cable system is ready to play in an energized competitive market, Putnam emphasized that Suddenlink’s modus operandi always has been that this is the way things will be.

“We originally laid a senior team that can execute at the size of the company that we currently have [and] grow as the company grew,” he said. “That was the first step in the process: getting the right people in the right spots. The second one was to go through an extensive process of selecting systems that have to be able to grow as the company grows ... setting up enterprise system platforms that can scale as the company scales and are open and flexible. So as we do acquisitions we can integrate them as seamlessly as possible.”

In other words, breaking the banquet into bite-sized pieces.