Telcordia at 25

Put a couple of retired Telcordia Technologies Inc. people in a room and you’ll be regaled with stories of the good old days. But talk to Telcordia folks on staff today, on the eve of the company’s 25th anniversary, and you may need to remind them they are part of telecom history. They seem more interested in trying to make history than in remembering it.

Besides, you’re not likely to find two retired Telcordia people to put in a room. It seems they never leave — not voluntarily anyway. Telcordia has had its share of force reductions like everyone else, but 375 employees remain from its inception on Jan. 1, 1984, due to divestiture. The company has another 155 or more employees from the Bell System who came over in the late ’80s.

This has been both a blessing and a curse to Telcordia. Much has been made of Telcordia’s legacy image, particularly by the flood of hotshot OSS startups around 1996 trying to make their mark — few of which survive on their own today. But the company’s legacy systems and a quality that CEO Mark Greenquist likes to call “deep domain expertise” have seen it through rough times. And according to Patrick Kelly, analyst at OSS Observer, Telcordia’s domain expertise has led to an uptick lately in business and momentum.

Kelly said Telcordia’s software business grew by 7 percent from 2006 to 2007, generating approximately $448 million and keeping Telcordia in the top 10 in telecom software sales. The company also generated another $200 million in service not related to the support of its software.

So what keeps people at Telcordia? “Doing interesting work,” said Howard Sherry, chief scientist for wireless systems and networks at Telcordia.

Sherry joined Bell Labs in 1972. He worked in network planning in the Central Services Organization, which became Bellcore, then Telcordia. “It was an exciting place to be rather than being the third guy in charge of the screw or the nut at Bell Labs. We had a lot more exciting things to do here and we still do,” he said.

Sherry’s first project was ISDN. He then started working on IP networking in 1984 and moved to Applied Research in 1990 where he earned patents in wireless communications and wireless security. His group worked practically incognito as they were no longer free to share information between the seven regional Bell-operating companies.

“When we were sold to SAIC [Nov. 17, 1997] we were able to come out of the closet and really do cellular work,” Sherry said. “Until then, we were just technical experts with no product to sell.”

AT&T Inc. recently confirmed that its wireless network now carries more voice traffic than its wired network and this has Sherry looking ahead. “There are times you think about the old days, like when someone retires, but that’s not the world now. And I would rather look at all the interesting and cool things still to do,” Sherry said.

The old days didn’t include quite the business accountability as the new days. And it has been up to Adam Drobot, CTO and president of Advanced Technology Solutions at Telcordia, to change the culture and the business model of what Greenquist calls the company’s biggest success story: its Applied Research (AR) department.

Drobot knows the company history well, but he has not long been a part of it. He came to Telcordia in 2002 and encountered a brilliant, but not necessarily aggressive, research team. “I came from SAIC where we were unafraid to go after some fairly big programs,” Drobot said. “So we instituted those principles to people here and they jumped right on it.”

AR went out and got research proposals funded by DARPA, solved communications problems with systems integrators in the Defense Department, reached out to telecom equipment manufacturers and, before you know it, had replaced the $7 million it once got from the RBOCs annually with brand new revenue.